The Year That Never Should Have Been
by TheSingingGirl
Summary: AU s3 finale. "Oh, how to shut him up? I know! Memory Lane!" But the Master has a rather different, more poignant memory in mind...
1. The north wind blows

**CH1 The north wind blows...**

"Master, just calm down. Just look at what you're doing. Just stop! If you could see yourself…"

The Doctor was perilously close to pleading now, physically restrained by the customary couple of mindless guards, looking up at the only other Time Lord in existence, beseeching him to understand, to realise…

The Master sighed, bored of the proceedings. Such a brilliant man, and yet so stupid! "Oh, do excuse me," he said to the cameras. "Little bit of personal business. Back in a minute." He turned to his military monkeys. "Let him go."

The Doctor found himself flung to the floor, and prostrate on the ground before the Master. This situation was just getting more and more out of hand, and if he couldn't stop it now… "It's that sound, the sound in your head. What if I could help?" he asked desperately.

The Master rolled his eyes contemptuously. "Oh, how to shut him up?" A glint came into his eye that made the Doctor's hearts clench in horror. It was the look the Master had when he was so certain of winning his childish, deathly games that he was prepared to tell anyone listening exactly what his plans were. It was generally at this point that most people would give up hope. Of course, for the Doctor, that point wouldn't come yet, but it was still a look to be feared.

"Memory Lane!" the Master announced. He clicked his fingers imperiously, and more soldiers (how many did he need?) hurried down from the bridge of the Valiant towards a seemingly very normal piece of panelling in the wall. "Don't open it just yet," he told them. "I want to tease him a little first. I think I deserve it."

The Doctor stared, completely lost.

"Lucy, dear," the Master called, in a mockery of a loving husband. The beautiful young woman came eagerly, slipping a hand round the villain's waist, standing pressed close to his side, and smiling at her husband.

"Aren't we just the ideal picture, Doctor?" the Master asked, placing a hand round Lucy's shoulders. "A Time Lord and his beloved human companion?"

"Whatever you're planning with Martha," the Doctor started, his voice lowering angrily, but the Master waved his hand dismissively, cutting him off.

"Oh, lovely Martha over there doesn't interest me at all. After all, she's not the girl you fell in love with, is she? As I'm sure Martha knows. You really have been cruel to her, you know. All those times you've blown her off, and don't you pretend you didn't know how she was feeling."

A ragged gasp came from Martha across the room, and one Time Lord turned to look at her briefly, but the Doctor's eyes were still fixed on the Master, and his gaze was wild now, comprehension lending him utter despair.

"Rose," he said.

"Ten out of ten!" the Master cried, jubilant. "She'd been working so hard to get back to you, Doctor. Amazing, for a human. D'you know, her version of Torchwood made a dimension cannon? And who would volunteer first to cross over, but our dear little Rose. Just for you, of course.

"You've already seen my renovations in the TARDIS, haven't you? We worked long and hard to get that mood lighting exactly right, didn't we dear?" This last comment was thrown casually to Lucy, who simpered at him a little. "Well, a paradox machine just waiting to be used was always going to weaken the dimensions a little. Not a problem unless someone is weakening the walls from the other side, too."

Another snap of the fingers, and the panel was pulled back. There was no dramatic hydraulic hiss or mechanised movement. Just the reality of a piece of wood heaved off the walls to reveal a cage, a large one, maybe three yards by two, the old fashioned kind, the type with a bit of rust on the iron bars, a huge padlock and a steel bowl of dubious looking water in one corner. It was occupied by a young, blonde woman who looked up with such fear in her eyes when light flooded her jail, and those eyes were so familiar to the Doctor. And not just the eyes, but the fear in them, too. Her face was practically the same as he remembered, a little thinner, perhaps, and the bags under her eyes were purple and puffy, her lashes strangely free of make-up, but still recognisable. Her clothes might have been fashionable once, practical for a working day in an organisation where you might be doing paperwork or you might be saving the world, but they were worse for wear now, her jeans torn and her shirt stretched by rough handling. The stains weren't too bad; there really wasn't that much blood. Just a bit over her right arm and on her left knee, where the once-blue denim was now ripped and a murky brown.

"Doctor?"

Her voice was exactly the same.

"Rose!"

Her tears were so different.

"She came through a couple of days ago. Such fortunate timing, don't you think? Coincidence is such a beautiful thing. Anyway, she realised she was on the TARDIS and started questioning me straight away—she's really quite plucky, that one—until I realised who she was. I'd been through the TARDIS memory banks, you see. Saw that touching transmission you made to Darlig Ulv Stranden, which actually means 'sick wolf beach' for your information, but of course I only saw up to your beautiful confession, my dear. Not hard to work out what_ you_ would have said, Doctor. And all the pictures of her in your room, so sweet. Anyway, once I realised who she was, I captured and imprisoned her, and waited for you to arrive so my plan could begin."

Neither of them was listening. The Doctor had run forward to the cage as soon as she called his name, only to be caught again by the Master's soldiers. The tears were cascading freely down Rose's face, leaving clean trails where they washed some of the grime away.

Somewhere outside the world that solely included the Doctor and Rose, Jack revived, drew in a strangled lungful of air, and before even waiting to let his head recover, pressed his wristwatch into Martha's hand.

"Teleport," he said grimly.

"I can't," she protested.

"We can't stop him!" Jack argued. "Get out of here. Get out."

Martha looked at him and nodded once. She stood up, wiling the Doctor to look at her before she left.

"Aw, I nearly forgot you!" the Master crowed. Martha flinched. "The would-be doctor. But tonight, Martha Jones, we've flown them in, all the way from prison…"

The doors swept back as yet more soldiers came in, pushing before them the restrained Jones family.

"Mum…" Martha breathed in horror.

Francine was crying. "I'm sorry," she told her daughter.

Martha had to turn away, and she noticed that the Doctor was finally looking at her. So, too, was the famous Rose.

There was an odd thing. Rose had always been spoken about in the past tense; Martha had assumed she was dead. Obviously she'd been way off the mark, as she'd found out at the end of the world, but it was logical thinking. She was either dead or trapped; Martha had just picked the wrong option. From the way the Doctor went on about her, she wouldn't have left willingly, and he wouldn't have got rid of her like he had Jack. Martha had come to quietly detest the faceless Rose, but now she was looking at her, and could see the very real fear that the woman was suffering, she found herself pitying her. After all, it wasn't exactly Rose's fault that the Doctor kept going on about her. Or that Martha herself had fallen for the Doctor.

Jack had just noticed Rose, too. That was the point, for him, when he lost pretty much all his hope. If Rose was in a cage, the Doctor was as good as shackled. Rose hadn't noticed him yet, and he was glad for it. According to the Doctor, she was still under the impression that he was dead and not immortal. Maybe that should be the other way round. Whatever; her reaction was not one he wanted to deal with just now, and more to the point, he didn't want her to have to deal with it just now. He ducked out of sight.

Seeing Martha's face seemed to calm the Doctor. It reminded him harshly that there was a whole world, a whole universe still waiting to be saved. Refocused, he turned to the Master. "The Toclafane, who are they?" The Master just smirked. "Who are they?!"

The Master descended the steps, moving away from Lucy, and placed a hand on the Doctor's cheek. Neither Martha nor Rose could prevent the slight horror they felt at the gentle, almost loving contact, though the Doctor didn't seem to care.

"Doctor, if I told you the truth, your hearts would break."

Then he kicked him in the stomach, sending him reeling towards the cage, which he hit with a metallic clang. Rose immediately reached out between the bars, placing a hand on his shoulder as he groaned in pain, her fingers clutching at his suit jacket, the same suit jacket that he had worn for Christmas at her mum's flat, the same suit jacket he had worn whilst blowing up a sun, _just to say goodbye_.

Martha wanted to go to him, too, but three of the Toclafane descended from where they had been hovering round the ceiling and she jerked back.

"Is it time?"

"Is it ready?"

"Is the machine singing?"

The Master made a show of checking his watch. "Two minutes past." He bounded back up the steps again. "So! Earthlings. Basically, um, end of the world." The laser screwdriver was lifted above his head in a manner that really should have been ridiculous, but still made the hairs on the back of Martha's neck stand up. "Here. Come. The drums!"

Suddenly music was echoing round the Valiant. _Voodoo Child._ "_Here come the drums, here come the drums…"_

The music ceased to matter as the sky wrenched itself apart in a hideous replica of the Red Sea. Thousands upon thousands of Toclafane poured out of the wounded heavens.

The Master was distracted, watching his dubious allies, ordering them, explaining the situation cheerily to his wife. The lingering Toclafane on the ship had disappeared outside; Martha took the opportunity to run to the Doctor where he was pulling himself into a sitting position, obviously badly winded, leaning against the cage.

"I'm sorry, Martha, I'm so sorry."

She didn't know what he was apologising for: her family's incarceration, her own personal danger, the way he'd hurt her over Rose.

When he explained, when he told her what she must do in order to save the world, she could only listen in dumbfounded horror. A single tear slipped down her cheek.

"You can't ask her to do all that," Rose whispered.

That decided Martha. "Yes, he can," she said, determined now. "See you in a year or so."

With that, she stood up, and gave a last glance to her family.

"Good luck," Rose breathed, but Martha merely closed her eyes and activated the teleport. She was gone.

Suddenly, the Master wheeled around and grabbed the Doctor forcibly by the shoulders, pulling him to the window. He didn't resist, though Rose reached out for him instinctively as he was torn from her grasp yet again.

"And so it came to pass that the human race fell and the Earth was no more. And I looked down upon my new dominion as master of all and I thought it… good."

A moment passed, and the Master closed his eyes, relishing it. Then he turned brusquely to the soldiers.

"Take that one-" he pointed at Jack "-to somewhere below, out of the way, and lock him up. Kill him if he struggles. Those lot-" he pointed at Martha's family "-can become staff. But for now they can be locked up, too. And- oh, the girly's gone. Never mind. I'll find her later. And as for these two-" this said with a smirk to the Doctor and Rose "-well, they can stay in there." He was gesturing towards Rose's cage. "For my entertainment."

Imprisoned with Rose Tyler. Well, it wasn't the first time.


	2. Did you miss me?

**CH2 Did you miss me?**

"In you go, Doctor!" the Master ordered happily.

The Doctor landed heavily on his shoulder, before Rose was there, pulling him up, brushing him down and totally ignoring the Master.

"You alright?" she asked, her eyebrows knitting together in the perfect picture of concern.

"How touching," the Master crooned from outside.

The Doctor glared at him.

"Well, go on, get reacquainted!" the Master said, sounding very like a parent trying to get a child to make friends. "I'll just sit here and enjoy the show." When neither of them said a word, he added, "I'm sure you've noticed the CCTV cameras. Whatever you don't want to say in front of me, I'll still see. Or hear, really. But same difference."

Rose turned her back resolutely to him. "Are you alright?" she asked the Doctor again.

"Yeah, I'm fine. You know me, I've been through worse."

"Too true."

There was a pause.

"What about you?" the Doctor asked. "How's it been, in Pete's World? How long has it been?"

The corner of Rose's mouth twisted into a slight grimace. "A year and four months since I was stranded. Eleven and a half since you said goodbye. And it's been… a bit rubbish, but you know, I kind of expected that. Work was good, though. Torchwood. And Mum had a boy. Tony. Cute little thing, but he doesn't half cry at night. How about you? How'd you meet Martha?"

"She's a medical student, and the hospital where she worked was transported to the moon. Anyway, she helped me save everyone in there, saved my life and I asked her to take a trip with me. And then one turned into two, and it all snowballed a bit."

Rose smiled. "I'm glad you weren't alone. I got scared you'd be so lonely again, just drifting…"

"That's better!" said the Master. "A bit of emotion. Not nearly dramatic enough, but it'll do for now."

She sighed. "This really isn't working. Can we save all the reunion stuff until I've got used to the idea of having you watching us the whole time and do the explanations now?"

"Oh, alright then, if we really must," the Master grumbled.

"Great. So who are you? Besides the Master?"

He seemed to deliberate on that for a while. "The other Time Lord," he finally said. "Ooh, no, I can't be anything _other_. You can be the other one," he said to the Doctor.

"Okay, question two. I thought you said you'd know if there were others?" Rose asked the Doctor.

"He changed himself into a human, to hide from the War," he explained in a low voice. "We found him in the year 100 trillion and Martha accidentally jogged his memory. He released his Time Lord consciousness and…" he shrugged, wincing as his shoulder protested painfully.

Rose went to touch him, to stroke his shoulder, but pulled back at the last moment. It felt too intimate, with the Master just sitting there with an amused grin on his face.

"Another question," she said, trying to sound businesslike to cover up her emotions. "Why are you doing this?"

"Who, me?" the Master asked, innocently. "Why does anyone take over the world? To make it better," he answered himself. "Imagine: I woke up, so to speak, and found out that my entire planet had disappeared. Gallifrey was gone. Just… gone." For the first time, Rose felt some sympathy for him. His voice was hollow, pained in exactly the same way as the Doctor's was when he talked about his home planet. Gallifrey, she now discovered. "So I'm creating a new one. New Gallifrey, it has a ring to it, don't you think?"

"What about Old Earth?" Rose said, getting angry now.

"Who cares?" said the Master.

Rose was about to retaliate when the Doctor put a hand on her arm. "Don't," he advised her.

"Why not?" she asked. "He's already got us imprisoned."

"Because you don't matter to him. Not in the slightest. You're only a human. But you are also a convenient method to torture me without physically damaging me."

Rose willed herself not to look at the Master, trying to quash the inevitable pang of fear.

"Don't aggravate him," the Doctor finished.

"Wouldn't make any difference," the Master pointed out. "Whether you're antagonising or not, he still loves you. You're still a brilliant torture method, as he put it. You can only make the situation worse."

Rose remained staring at the Doctor. She really didn't want to see that manic smile beaming maliciously down at her. "Okay. Point taken."

The Doctor smiled weakly at her, and she smiled back. "Sorry," he said.

"What on earth are you sorry for? It was me who used the dimension cannon." And him who imprisoned me, she thought.

"Just apologising in general," he said. "If you hadn't met me, you wouldn't be here right now."

"No," she agreed. "But I think I still prefer it this way."

"We'll see about that," said the Master, grinning. "Now, I'm going to go and get settled in. Instruct Miss Jones' family on their new occupations. Gloat a bit at Mr Harkness. Sounds fun, don't you think?"

With that, he turned and swept out of the room. As soon as Rose was relatively sure he wouldn't come back, she was in the Doctor's arms.

"I'm so sorry!" she said. "If I hadn't gone and blasted my way through, he wouldn't have me to use against you!"

He clutched her against his chest. "Nothing to be sorry for. It's not like it ever would have worked if he hadn't already been weakening the structure of reality. And he would have ended up threatening to kill Martha's family so I would do what he wanted, anyway."

"I missed you," Rose said, shakily.

"He can still hear us," the Doctor pointed out.

"Yeah, but if he's gonna be able to hear us for the next… however long… then I'm damned if I'm not gonna talk to you at all, ever."

"Good point," the Doctor conceded. "In which case, I missed you too."

They hugged for a moment, rememorizing the way their bodies fitted together like puzzle pieces, the smell of his skin, and the softness of her hair. He pulled back slightly after a while to check her injuries, her arm and her leg. She let him, knowing that she'd been able to keep the grazes relatively clean thanks to her Torchwood first aid training, letting him reassure himself that she was safe. For a few seconds she could relax under the gentle touch of his long thin fingers that had clasped her hand so many times…

"Jack," she said suddenly.

She felt him tense. "Ah, yeah."

"I thought he was dead?"

"He's not."

"Well, no, I kinda guessed that. Did you know he was still alive?"

He sighed. "It's not that simple, Rose," he said.

She looked up at him, and felt any accusations she had melt away. She'd only just been reunited with him, after all. "I believe you. Just tell me why."

So he recounted what had happened on Satellite Five, told her what she'd done, and told her how he'd run away, dizzy and sick from the effects of the vortex and regeneration. He told her how he'd met Jack again, and what he did as a job; what he had been doing for the past hundred years.

"Hundred? Oh God, he must hate me so much!"

"No," the Doctor said. "He doesn't hate you. Okay, so he doesn't like the immortality thing a huge amount, but he knows it wasn't your fault. You know," he added, "it's not all bad. Not dying. Can come in quite useful at times."

"I s'pose," Rose said. "But I know you."

"Ooh, you know me so well, Rose Tyler," he said, grinning a little half-heartedly.

"Don't start quoting Andrew Lloyd Webber songs at me," she retorted.

"Actually, it was Tim Rice who wrote the lyrics," the Doctor said.

"I said Andrew Lloyd Webber _songs_, not just Andrew Lloyd Webber."

"So you did. You win."

She chuckled. "This really isn't how I imagined us meeting up again. First I'm captured—well, should've expected that one—then you are, and now we're discussing musicals."

"How did you imagine it?" he asked.

Instinctively, she glanced at the looming CCTV camera in the corner. This was not a question she wanted to answer with the Master listening. In fact, she wasn't sure she wanted to answer it at all. Because she knew exactly how she had imagined this, dreamed of this. And it broke about three thousand of the unwritten rules the Doctor had laid down between them. Possibly a few more.

"Can I ask you a question first?" she hedged.

"Ask away," he said, oblivious.

"What the Master said… about…" She took a deep breath. "He said you loved me."

She could swear the resultant silence actually hurt her. Then, all of a sudden, he had taken her face in his hands and had moved his lips to his ear to whisper to her.

"Do you trust me?"

"Course I do," she replied, still a little shaken.

Abruptly, with no warning whatsoever, he was in her mind. Her eyes widened in shock to see his eyelids closed, his head tilted towards hers as she felt him inside her. The presence was slightly unsettling, unused to it as she was, but it was so _him_ that she couldn't complain in the slightest.

_You may want to be aware that I can hear everything you're thinking._

Rose grimaced as she thought of the implications of that. _Right. I'll try not to think anything too embarrassing then. _A pause, while she attempted to do just that, and realised she was failing miserably. _So, why are you inside my head?_

_Because it means he _(Rose was unnerved by the image of the Master as the Doctor thought of him) _can't hear us. He's blocking me from feeling his mind via a phone network, but it works both ways. He can only just sense my presence; he'd need physical contact to get into my mind. Can't do this often though, he'd work it out eventually, and that wouldn't be pretty._

_Okay, I get it. So… _her mind trailed off to the question she'd tried to ask, and the statement she'd actually come out with. The answer was immediate and certain. It seemed like she could hear all his thoughts too.

_Only because I'm not trying to block you, _he told her. _I love you, Rose. I just… I didn't know. Okay, so maybe I did, but I was always so wrong for you, you've got a family and Mickey out there, and I'm a Time Lord, we were trained specifically to ignore emotions, and there were so many reasons why it could never work, and you know me, I'm clueless, couldn't work out if that was what you wanted from me, and then when you said it on the beach… well, you know what happened, running out of time._

The thoughts came as a rush, a garbled explanation and excuse. But more than the words, she felt it. She felt the struggle it was for him to admit it, she knew the reasons why, she sensed the battle in his own heart to stop him falling in love. She wasn't even sure 'in love' was the right phrase. It wasn't the same as the way she felt, but it didn't matter. Men and women, Time Lords and humans, children and adults all loved in a different way. It didn't make any type of love any less potent.

_But he can't know how idiotically much I love you, _he carried on. _He'd only hurt you worse._

_Oh great, so you've got to pretend to be indifferent to me, _Rose thought.

_That's it, in a nutshell. Nail on the head, and all that. I'm sorry. Again._

_I didn't actually mean to think that. It was instinctive. And it's not your fault. You're only trying to stop me getting tortured!_

She felt, more than heard, his horrified mental reaction to that idea, and suddenly her head felt strangely empty. She opened her eyes, unaware that she'd closed them, and felt the absence of his fingers at her temples.

"I still love you," she said. Then she remembered that the Master was probably still listening and thought about it a bit. "No matter what you say," she added.

He looked a bit baffled for a moment, and then he caught on. "Rose, we've got to coexist in this really rather tiny space for all eternity unless something goes brilliantly wrong, let's not make it difficult, yeah?"

"Alright then," she huffed.

"Touching again," came a voice. Evidently the Master had installed speakers, too. "Shame your ship was quite vocal about your feelings, Doctor. After a little prodding, anyway. Otherwise, I might just have believed you. You're a good actor, Miss Tyler."

They looked at each other. "Thanks," Rose eventually muttered. Like the Doctor said, she didn't want to aggravate him.

A little burst of laughter, and then there was the triumphant _click _of a microphone being turned off.

"Well, that lasted all of five seconds," Rose said bitterly.

"Nice try, though," the Doctor said.

She acknowledged that with a slight turn of the head.

"And there are a couple of advantages to that plan not working," he continued.

She raised an eyebrow.

"Always wanted to do this," he said, waggling his own eyebrows cheekily.

And then he kissed her.

The sarcastic applause emanating from the speakers spoiled the moment, just a tad.


	3. Just telling each other stories

**CH3 Just telling each other stories**

They spent the next few hours exchanging stories. Rose told him all about her new job at Torchwood, how she had been promoted so she was always the first point of contact for extra-terrestrial life forms ("It's still all about being a people person, 'specially after us Tylers got in there"), her little team, codenamed the Team TARDIS: They Are Really Dancing In Stars ("we spent ages on that—Mickey came up with some really awful stuff"), which consisted of Mickey on tech, Jake on guns, a guy called Owen who was the medic and herself as whatever she was needed to be. She told him how Jackie had protested against Rose going out and dealing with the hostile aliens ("she said it was like nothing had ever changed. That made me laugh") and how Pete had encouraged her. She talked about little Tony, and the way Jackie had fussed over him and bemoaned their lack of Rose's baby photos, and how Pete had adapted brilliantly to being a double dad, even if he had gone round looking surprised for a few weeks when Tony came along.

She broke off after that.

"I'm sorry," the Doctor told her.

"No, 's alright. I'll miss 'em, and they'll miss me, but they knew I was trying to get through. Mickey was so sure I'd find you. He'll help Mum. And I was always trying to get here. It's just…" She waved a hand, struggling to find the words.

"I know."

Of course he did. She smiled. "So go on then. How's it been for you?"

He got stuck in straight away, trying to cheer her up. He told her about Donna appearing on the TARDIS ("Can you believe it, about one point two seconds after I got cut off talking to you!") and the second crazy Christmas, how Martha's hospital had actually been scooped up by rhinos ("a platoon of Judoon, on the moon: it was brilliant"), how they'd revisited New Earth ("and you thought _our_ troubles there were bad—the traffic was a nightmare"), the sun he'd nearly fallen into ("black holes, suns, I hope this isn't a tradition forming"), the time he'd got stuck in 1969 ("about as domestic as you get; I had to pretend to be Martha's husband!").

This last comment drew a laugh from Rose. "Poor Martha is all I've got to say!"

"She was alright! She got a job and everything. Worked in a department store."

"I'm beginning to think you've got a bit of a thing for shop girls…"

And so the hours passed. They compared notes on alien races, occasionally surprising each other when it turned out that in Pete's World, it was the Jingatheen who were the Raxacoricofallpatorian family sentenced to death, not the Slitheen, and that the Cult of Skaro had survived, and Dalek Caan was still out there, somewhere, somewhen.

"They're almost as persistent as you," he said with a brief grin.

After a while, he began to get restless. She, of course, had been stuck in the cage for a couple of days, and whilst she wasn't exactly used to it, she was certainly better adapted than him.

"I hate being stuck in one place," he said, now pacing the small area as she leant back against the bars and watched him. "It's the whole reason I left Gallifrey in the first place."

"You never told me it was called Gallifrey," Rose said idly.

He looked at her then. "It was too raw. And then it never really came up." A wry smile twisted his lips. "Martha made me tell her. Sat down in the slums of New New York and refused to move until I explained what I was being so cryptic about. I couldn't decide if I hated her or liked her for that. Did I tell you we met the Face of Boe again?"

"It was probably a good thing," Rose said. "Acceptance is supposed to be the next stage of grief, isn't it?"

She realised she wasn't jealous of her, this Martha, at all, which was slightly odd. She'd been expecting to be practically emerald-eyed when it turned out there was another young, pretty girl travelling with him, but she knew now that he loved her, and most certainly did not love Martha. Not like that, anyway. It was obvious.

"Do you want to hear about it? Gallifrey?" he asked, suddenly stopping his ceaseless pacing and facing her.

The question shocked her a little, but she tried not to show it. "So long as you want to tell me," she smiled.

And so passed another hour. He detailed to her the burning orange sky, the inferno of the double sunrises, the silver of the leaves ("every different shade of silver had a different name, and all of them only translate once into English as silver"), the glass dome enclosing the magnificent citadel, the majesty of the Academy spires, the crimson grass that swayed in a light breeze, the raw power of the Untempered Schism. Rose sat, wonderingly, her eyes wide as she listened to the image of a world she couldn't begin to imagine. He smiled as he finished, watching her reaction.

"And it's odd, because I never thought it was beautiful," he said, his eyes closed, seeing it now.

"Really?" Disbelief coloured her tone.

He opened his eyes and looked at her. "Not until it was gone."

Rose understood now. "Yeah, I never thought Earth was much until we were stuck on that planet next to the black hole," she said. "All green and blue…"

"And all we could see was red and black," he finished. "I've never seen the silver of the K'uyiutaei leaves again."

"Koy…"

"K'uyiutaei," he repeated. "Lots of vowels. Bit difficult if you're not used to the language."

"Sounds beautiful," Rose said. "I always liked languages at school. Did French and Italian for GCSE, and even German for a bit. French was the only exam I got an A in. It sounded exotic, y'know? But you'd just learn dry bits of grammar and vocab lists, and then I left school, and never thought about it again. Not like we had the money to go abroad. And the TARDIS never stopped translating for me, not even in the parallel world, so I never had to try."

"No…" he agreed absently, then suddenly looked at her in sharp focus. "Hang on. The TARDIS didn't stop translating for you?"

She shook her head. "Thought it was a bit weird, the walls being back in place, and all that. It's why I didn't just give up looking for a way through. Well, one of the reasons."

A smile spread slowly across the Doctor's face. "You are one very special human, Rose Tyler. The TARDIS must've connected with you. Maybe when I sent that message through. Or maybe when you looked into her. She latched on, and stayed attached," he mused. "Which means," he suddenly realised. "That you're probably not very normal any more. For a human."

She blinked at him.

"You know you pick up background radiation in the TARDIS?"

"Of course," she said. She'd revived a Dalek with it; how could she forget?

"Well, I guess you've got a whole extra dose. Probably from absorbing the Vortex. And then the message activated it..." He reached into his jacket pocket, then remembered. "Oh, he's got my screwdriver! How useless am I, I can't even scan you!"

"Never mind," she said. "I've survived this long not knowing."

"It won't be harmful," he asserted. "Look at how long I've been with her! But I was just thinking, it might have some other effects… might alter your physiology just a bit…"

"How?" she asked. Her eyebrows were furrowed just a touch, the look of concentration so endearing.

He forced himself to shake his head. "I can't say. And it would be mean to tell you what might happen, and then it might not happen at all."

"I'm a big girl, Doctor," she said. "I can handle it."

"I'm sure you could," he agreed.

"Then what's the problem?"

"Threefold. First, even though you could handle it, it would still be horrible. Second, I don't know if I can handle it. Third, there's him upstairs listening in."

"I get your point," she said. A pause. "Horrible in that I'd be forever expecting the worst or horrible in that I could be disappointed?"

He met her eyes. "Maybe both."

There was a beat, and then she nodded. They regarded each other in silence for a moment, wondering what the other was thinking. Wondering if it was better that they didn't know.

Footsteps broke into their quiet questioning, and they both looked up towards the open door to see Tish Jones entering the room. She was dressed now in a maid's outfit, hideously clichéd, complete with white frilly apron and mobcap.

"Tish!" the Doctor said. "I'm so sorry, I had no idea, I would have warned you back at Lazarus's do, believe me."

The young woman bit her lip. "If I talk to you once I have finished delivering this message then I will be punished," she said. The words were measured, as though she had been reciting them on her journey so as not to make a single mistake. The way her voice shook on the last word told Rose and the Doctor that she knew exactly what being 'punished' would entail.

She pushed two tin dishes, reminiscent of wartime or camping food containers, through the gaps in the bar, turning them lengthways so they could traverse the narrow space.

"Martha will be fine," the Doctor said. "I know she will. At least she's not here."

Tish didn't dare respond.

"And please tell your mother it's not her fault," the Doctor continued. "Martha said it was Francine who first got in contact with the Saxon party. She didn't know; she was just trying to protect her daughter. They would have caught us anyway."

She didn't even nod, just met his eyes for half a second, then turned on her heels and walked hastily out of the room.

"Why is it that the families have to get involved nowadays?" the Doctor said sadly. "It never happened before you. I think Sarah-Jane once mentioned that she was an orphan, but other than that, I don't even know if any of them even have families. Or had," he added, as an afterthought. "I knew about Romana's relations, of course. Knew her whole family tree."

"How come?" Rose asked.

"She was from Gallifrey," the Doctor told her, absently.

She still managed to hear the pain. "I'm sorry."

He shrugged it off. "Aren't you going to eat?" he asked. "You look a bit thin."

She grimaced. "Have you seen this stuff?"

He crouched down to examine it. "This is what he's been feeding you for the last two days?" he asked.

"Uh-huh," she said. "It's disgusting."

"And like a lot of food that happens to taste disgusting, it's very, very good for you. You see, it's not really food at all. It's a chemical mixture of proteins and carbohydrates and minerals and fibre and stuff that keeps your body in prime physical condition." He pulled a face. "It's what they made you eat in some of the stricter parts of the Academy. Of course, this'll be adapted for humans, but we're not all that different, nutrition-wise anyway."

Rose frowned. "How different?"

"Don't worry about me," he said to her, which immediately told her she'd hit the nail on the head.

"How different?"

He sighed. "I'll have a lot less energy. It's his way of keeping me subdued. But that's all. I won't get sick or anything. Honest," he added, watching her sceptical face.

"Okay, I'll believe you," she said reluctantly.

He plonked himself down and grabbed a bowl. "Right then. Bon appétit!"

Together, they braced themselves to take a bite. They had no spoons or forks, so they were reduced to eating with their fingers, and even as Rose pushed her fingertips into the cold, slimy mush, she knew it was going to taste just as terrible as it had the first time. And as luck would have it, she was absolutely right. There were no words to describe what this stuff tasted like. It wasn't sour, or bitter, or salty, or dull, it was just absolutely amazingly awful. She only managed an eighth of the dish before she set it down with a loud _clang_, and clapped a hand over her mouth.

The Doctor had eaten about half already. "How on earth can you eat that?" Rose demanded between her fingers.

He shrugged. "I told you, they made us eat it at the Academy. I'll bet you it tastes a hundred times worse for me—you know how sensitive my tongue is."

She couldn't resist a weak grin at that, thinking of mistletoe doors and A positive blood.

"Have a drink," he suggested.

The grin faded back into a grimace again, coupled with an embarrassed blush. "I wouldn't drink that," she said.

His eyebrows snapped together as he set his own dish down to move over to the far corner of the cage and look at a tin bowl. "Why's that then… Oh, that's just disgusting."

Tinged with a hint of green, and with a thin film of scum floating on its surface, it could hardly be called water. After contemplating it for a few seconds, the Doctor whirled around to face Rose. "Have you been drinking this?"

She winced instinctively at the fury in his eyes, the fiery ice that could shatter whole planets, even though she knew it wasn't in any way directed at her. "Once," she admitted. "But it was alright when I first came through. Sort of. I mean, it's just that they haven't changed it."

"Now I'm getting angry," the Doctor said, unnecessarily. "He's been keeping you here in the dark, no way of knowing what time it is, with sludge for food and no decent water? Is he trying to drive you mad?!"

She stood up, shakily, went to him, but he wouldn't be placated. "You've got no energy, you can't have slept, you've got no form of exercise available, your muscles are going to waste away if you don't exercise regularly, if you can't eat that filth without vomiting you'll gain no nutrients whatsoever and to top it off if you drink _that _you're going to get severely ill."

He was holding her upright now, somehow letting his hands feel so gentle under her elbows even while his face was hard as flint. He twisted his head to face the CCTV camera. "I thought you wanted her alive and healthy to torture? Not sickening in the corner of a cage, completely useless to you!"

There was no answer. "He must be off doing something else," Rose said.

"He'll see it," the Doctor said grimly. "He'll hear it."

"Yeah, well we can't do anything about it until then, can we," she reminded him reasonably.

"True," he conceded. The anger and the energy suddenly left his face in one of those blinding mood swings that she remembered so well. "Are you tired? If you were awake at three or four this morning, who knows what's happened to your sleep cycle."

"Yeah," she confessed. "Don't know when I last slept."

"Come on then," he said and tugged her gently to the ground. He cast about for anything he might have missed on the last thousand times he scoured the cage for any sort of human comfort, but had to admit defeat. Instead, he laid her so her head rested on his thigh.

She tried to sit up again. "I can't sleep like that; you'll be really uncomfortable."

It was so Rose. He pushed her back down and laid a hand on her head, encouraging her to stay there. "I'll be fine. I'm more worried about you. Just sleep."

"If you're sure…" she muttered, and her eyelids were already fluttering. She looked truly exhausted.

"Sea-sure," he said.

She emitted a tiny giggle, more a breath than a laugh, before her breathing slowed right down and her body relaxed entirely. He pulled his fingers gently through her hair as she slept, wondering whether it would have been better had he never met Rose Tyler at all.


	4. Because it hurts

**CH4 Because it hurts**

When she woke, Rose was a bit disorientated, to say the least. She was used to waking up after a dodgy night's sleep missing the sound of the TARDIS humming, remembering that she was lost, that he was lost, that she was stuck and alone, and then scolding herself for being so melancholy and ungrateful and telling herself to get up because if you go back to sleep now, you'll be late for work.

Right now, she was most definitely not in her bed, either in the TARDIS or in the Tyler Mansion mark II (mark I had been sold because it contained too many bad memories). Her hip felt like it would have a hideous bruise on it if she looked, which meant she was lying on a hard surface. Her head, though, was resting on a warm, soft surface. Maybe she really was exhausted, but didn't a person's thigh normally have bones?

Suddenly it all came back to her. The dimension cannon, the TARDIS, the Master, the cage, the Doctor. Oh, the Doctor.

Rose's eyes flew open, registering the light that flooded the bridge of the Valiant, and sat up quickly, too quickly, and felt her head spin painfully. Before she could fall down again, though, a pair of arms encircled her, supported her, hugged her.

"Morning, sleepyhead," the Doctor said.

She leant her head back on his shoulder. "Morning," she smiled.

She shifted a bit to stretch, arching her back and letting her hair fall over her shoulders, baring her neck as she rotated her head. "How long've I been asleep?" she asked.

"Thirteen hours, twelve minutes and twenty three seconds."

She lifted a hand to wipe away the sticky residue around her eyes, reflecting that her makeup must look absolutely horrendous by now. She didn't wear as much mascara any more, but still…

It was at that point that she realised that she must have been resting her head on the Doctor's stomach. He was probably as stiff as she was.

"Did you sleep at all?" she asked the Doctor. She knew that he didn't sleep as much as her, not by a long stretch, but he did sleep occasionally. Once every couple of months, as far as she could work out. Even then, she wasn't sure he actually needed the sleep. He had said more than once that it got boring when she was asleep, so maybe he was just trying to while away the hours.

"Nah," he replied. "Got better things to be doing than sleeping." He said the last word scornfully, and for a second Rose was reminded of his last incarnation's habit of referring to humans as apes in that exact same tone.

"Like what?" she asked.

She didn't miss the quick glance he threw at the camera in the corner of the cage, a glance which she interpreted as 'things that I can't talk about while there's a chance that the Master might hear us, so that means things that I told Martha yesterday, things to do with the countdown, whenever that may be.'

"Thinking," he said obliquely.

Rose nodded, smiling a bit to show she understood, not daring to risk a wink. The smile faded immediately. Faded wasn't perhaps the right word; it vanished with all the speed of a teleport. The Doctor frowned, then twisted round to look over his shoulder.

The Master strolled in, swaggering casually towards his captives. "Checklist," he announced, pulling out a tightly furled scroll from his suit pocket. "Number one, water."

Rose guessed he must have dimensionally transcendental pockets, as he pulled out a few bottles of water using the hand that wasn't holding the scroll in a pompous manner and chucked them through the bars.

"Number two, and I quote "you can't eat that sludge for food without vomiting", have some sugar."

A bag of sugar thumped to the ground beside them. Not that it would probably help much.

"Number three, and I quote again "your muscles are going to waste away" so, muscle stimulants."

A packet of pills joined the small pile of objects.

"And finally, last, but by absolutely no means least, in fact I probably should have made this number one, seeing as it's my priority, even if it's not yours, and it has the possibility to cancel out numbers one to three, if some of my deepest darkest suspicions prove correct, and since I am a genius, they might do…"

Rose had almost, but not quite, tuned out.

"… though of course there are always my other deep, dark suspicions which could be the more accurate, especially if you take the definition of accuracy to be getting close to the actual answer, rather than being the actual answer..."

"What's number four?" the Doctor asked.

The Master pouted petulantly. "Oh, you cut me off. Number four, and I quote yet again "how useless am I, I can't even scan you!""

Rose's eyes widened even as the Doctor's narrowed.

"So, let's rectify that situation, shall we?" the Master asked rhetorically, throwing the scroll carelessly onto the large table and rubbing his hands together. "Rose, dear, would you like to step this way?"

He moved over to the cage, drawing out a rather rusty old key from a pocket and fitting it into the heavy padlock. Both Rose and the Doctor were standing now, Rose somewhat shakily. She had very little energy and had only just woken up. Brilliant time to get scanned by a maniac. The Doctor moved himself in front of her, blocking the Master's path to her, and their sightline.

"Oh dear, Doctor, there's really no point trying to protect her," the Master said condescendingly, pulling out his laser screwdriver slowly, menacingly. "And even if you did get out of the cage, how easy would it be for me to capture you? Especially using this."

The Doctor didn't reply, but just stared the Master down. He was slightly surprised, but not very, to feel Rose put a hand on his shoulder.

"Don't," she said quietly. "He's right. We can't do anything."

"Such intelligence!" the Master said happily.

Rose ignored him. "No point you getting hurt." She was eyeing the laser screwdriver warily.

The Doctor sighed and stepped aside. It felt utterly, absurdly wrong to do so. He had never done this before, just let her go off into danger where she was powerless, he was powerless, and there was no chance of escape. He had left her behind, he couldn't deny that, but he had never sent her to the front line. Not intentionally, he amended, thinking of the Sycorax. And the Isolus. And… but never intentionally.

Rose slid her hand down his arm as she walked unsteadily past him, letting their fingers link together for the briefest moment before their hands dropped unwillingly and the door clanged violently in front of the Doctor's nose.

"Where're we doing this?" Rose asked. She was trying not to sound insolent, the Doctor could tell, but her anger and her fear were making it difficult. She'd never been particularly timorous, after all.

"I thought here would do," the Master said, indicating the room with a sweeping gesture. "Stand there," he added, pointing to a point just in front of the cage. Giving the Doctor front row seats, as it were.

Rose moved stiffly to the spot he indicated, risking a glance at the Doctor. He looked scared, she realised, and that scared her. He was never scared. She tried to smile at him, to reassure him, but all that did was make him look even more afraid.

"Why so nervous?" the Master asked. "There are a thousand ways I could scan you without causing any harm whatsoever."

The Doctor tore his gaze from Rose to fix the Master with a piercing glare. "I've never trusted you before, and I don't think now would be a good time to start."

"Oh, you are a smart cookie," the Master crowed. "So, Miss Tyler, are you ready?"

She wasn't. But then could she ever be? "Yeah," she said shortly.

"Yes what?"

He sounded like a schoolteacher, she thought. So patronising. "Yes, Master."

"And I thought it was good when _you_ used my name!" the Master exclaimed. "But that, now that just gives me chills. I've got shivers running all up and down my spine. You should ask Lucy, I love it when the women cry my name."

The Doctor looked murderous.

"But let's not waste time on the foreplay, shall we?" the Master continued, brandishing his screwdriver.

Rose refused to pay attention to the blatant innuendos. She had enough to deal with at that moment in time, as became clear a second later when a high pitched wail attacked her eardrums. Another second after that, and the pain hit. She gritted her teeth, and screwed up her face, determined not to make a sound. She couldn't hurt the Doctor that way, and what good would screaming do? No, she was Rose Tyler, defender of the Earth, and she could stand a bit of pain. Never mind that every muscle in her body was going into spasm, one after another after another, clenching and relaxing violently as it was scanned in turn. Never mind that her bones juddered and shook, trying to wrench themselves away from the ligaments. Never mind that her intestines seemed to be tying themselves in knots, and her lungs were under so much pressure that she had no air to breathe, and her stomach had retracted into a tiny ball, and her eyes were rolling in their sockets, and her blood was racing as her heart beat out a rhythm that was far too fast, and her head... oh, her head was killing her.

The Doctor was watching her body convulse with his knuckles turning white from clutching at the bars of his cage. He wanted to shout at the Master, to tell him to stop, but he couldn't find his voice. He couldn't tear his eyes away from Rose as she writhed silently on the floor. If she looked at him, she couldn't see him turned away in fear or disgust; he had to be there for her. So he watched, as her hands were clawing at her clothing, at her skin where her nails could reach it, leaving angry red lines across her stomach, her face, her arms. Her mouth was wrenched open in a soundless scream, her face twisted into a horrible, contorted grimace, and every now and then she would emit a small grunt involuntarily, like an animal in pain.

The Master watched the both of them as time ticked on. Seconds passed into minutes, which multiplied. It didn't have to take this long, but why should he skimp on her pain? An amused smile curved round his lips, and his eyes were alight, until his screwdriver let out an abrupt wail. Immediately, he released the button and examined the instrument, leaving Rose to slump, panting, to the floor. The Doctor still stood, immobilised, watching her heaving breaths. Her face was turned away from him, and a part of him was glad that he couldn't see the residual pain.

"No…"

The quiet sound of disbelief made the Doctor snap his head round to glare at the Master, who, true to form, ignored him and continued to adjust the head of the laser screwdriver. "That's…"

"What?" the Doctor growled.

Still, the Master ignored him.

Rose sat up, slowly, heavily, leaning on her arms which shook violently and threatened to give out, but they didn't. She rested for a moment with her eyes closed, drawing deep breaths, before asking, "What is it?"

Instantly, the Master was at her side, helping her up, lending her his shoulder to bear her weight. Rose flinched slightly at the contact, but was too weak to resist being dragged upright. The Master pulled out a chair from round the official-looking glass table, and guided her gently into it.

"What?" she asked again, her voice hoarse and cracked.

She had no strength to react when the Master's lips were suddenly pressed urgently against hers. The Doctor was shocked into a rare silence, but before the rage could build up far, the Master had pulled away and had turned to him, that infamous grin on his youthful face.

"Ha! You thought they were gone. You thought there was no hope! But you were wrong, you hear me? Wrong!" He broke into a burst of manic laughter.

"What do you mean?" the Doctor asked. He spoke through gritted teeth and with a barely controlled voice.

"The Time Lords! You said they were lost. No hope of repopulating, of course, you'd need a female Gallifreyan to do that. And there she is!"

They both looked at Rose, whose head was still lolling to one side, her face completely unmoved. The sight was pitiful.

"Of course, she's not a Time Lord, just your run-of-the-mill proletariat, and physically she's still pretty much human, but she's genetically close enough. Ninety-eight per cent—more than enough! And it gets better!" the Master crowed. "Unlike a trueborn Gallifreyan, she still has a functioning uterus and ovaries! It doesn't even matter that we don't have the Looms!"

"I… 'm not…" Rose struggled to say.

"I think a change of accommodation is in order!" the Master announced. "We have to make you comfortable, sweetie. Anything you want, you can have. Unless it's damaging to your health, of course. I'll go and organise your new rooms. Until then, I'm afraid you'll have to stay here. I'll just lock this door, shall I?" he asked rhetorically, sweeping out of the room. A loud clunk let the captive pair know that he had made good on his threat.

The Doctor was pressed so close to the iron bars that he would leave bruises. Rose's eyes dropped shut as she retreated to the bliss of unconsciousness.


	5. Human? Is that optional?

**CH5 Human? Is that optional?**

Rose's new quarters were decorated tastefully in varying shades of pale pink. Her room was furnished in a delicate, feminine way, with a beautiful wrought-iron four-poster bed with frothy white netting and cream silk sheets dominating the centre of the room, thought there was enough space for at least three more. The carpet was thick and soft, protecting bare feet from any discomfort. She had two pretty dressing tables painted an innocent white, with lights that were rose-tinted, softening the reflection of whoever should care to look in the gilded mirrors that could be adjusted to show three angles of a person's head. A window was set into one of the walls, six metres wide and one and a half tall, complete with a cushioned window seat. The view of uninterrupted blue sea and sky, mingling at the horizon to form a haze of azure, was relaxing and calming. There was a bathroom en suite to the bedroom, this time decorated in powder blues, complete with luxury hot tub, power shower, and a bath so big one could swim in it. A walk-in wardrobe completed the ensemble, stocked with the latest in fashion for any occasion: casual wear, formal wear, underwear, night wear. The dressing table drawers were also filled with dainty trinkets: diamonds and the like. Rose hated every inch of it.

The pink was too girly; she had outgrown it years ago. If it had to be pink, why not choose deep raspberry? The dressers were carved with pictures of roses which were far too twee and the whole "rose for a Rose" thing had been overdone more times than she cared to count. The clothing was mostly in pink, too, which annoyed her no end. She was not in the mood to wear pink. Hadn't been for a year and a half, if truth be told. She'd got into red quite a bit since she was stranded. Red was a brilliant colour—conveyed all sorts of emotions. Love, hate, passion, lust, anger—you could take your pick. Pink was a different story.

She had to admit that a long hot shower was a godsend, and the bed was incredibly soft and luxurious, even if all the silk was frustrating. But how on earth could she appreciate benefits like these when the door remained locked, the Master's room was just next door, she was sure laser screwdrivers were just as good at unpicking locks as sonic ones, and the Doctor was still stuck in an iron cage?

Now dressed in the most practical clothes she could find (a pair of dark jeans which suited her mood and a blue cotton t-shirt, as she had decided to ignore the pink as much as she could), Rose let out all her breath in a huff and collapsed onto the silken bed. She hoped she gave the stupid sheets wrinkles. Trying to force herself to calm down, she turned her mind to the pressing matters that she was facing at the moment.

She was Gallifreyan. Or, at least, as Gallifreyan as her mate Shareen was Indian. Born British, or human, but not really if you looked at the genes. But whatever, that didn't matter right now. What mattered was what it meant for her. And for the Doctor.

Rose was very aware that the Master had only given her and the Doctor paltry details of what her change in genetics actually involved. Apparently she was "physically mostly human", which she could have worked out for herself, bearing in mind the fairly obvious lack of a second heart and her need for sleep. She'd noticed months before at her Torchwood medical check-ups that her body temperature was slightly lower than the average thirty seven, more like thirty four most of the time, but she'd assumed that was a reaction to some sort of alien bug or radiation or something, and Torchwood had agreed. Well, it turned out they hadn't been that far off. None of this interested her in the slightest.

The Master had mentioned the word 'repopulating'. And the fact that her uterus and ovaries were still functioning.

This was taking torture to the next level. Maybe he was giving her beautiful rooms and luxury clothing, but at what price? Suddenly disgusted with where she was lying, she scrambled off the bed, leaving the sheets as wrinkled as she'd wished. It almost looked like someone had been… She straightened the sheets with trembling hands and a sickened mind, then flung herself on the window seat, staring out at the endless ocean.

Maybe it's not so bad, she consoled herself. Maybe Gallifreyans don't reproduce in the human way. Maybe he'd just take one of her eggs, and implant it back into her womb. Maybe he wouldn't resort to…

But how could that be any better? For her, directly, it was infinitely better, but for the child? The Gallifreyan child she would bear anyway… how could she bring a child into a world where… and its father… its father… Oh, God. Obviously it wouldn't be the Doctor. Why use the Time Lord with genes that had a predisposition to goodness?

How she stopped herself bursting into tears, she didn't know. Instead, they trickled silently down her cheeks, and she wiped them angrily away. They wouldn't do any good now.

* * *

Meanwhile, the Doctor was pacing his cage, his horror now combined with his rage to provide an overwhelming fury. Rose hadn't woken up for the entire day and night after her _scanning_, and armed guards had watched his every move as he lay her on a mattress that had been so graciously provided by the Master and knelt by her, watching her innocent sleeping face, lying by her when her body temperature dropped even lower than his own. That was how the Master had found them the next morning when he strode into the room.

"Naughty naughty, Doctor!" he scolded. "That would be my job from now on."

The Doctor had stood up, pulling away from Rose so gently before turning to tower over the Master. "Don't touch her," he said, and his voice was not shaking with anger or fear, but as cold as an icicle, and as sharp.

"Or…?" the Master asked, still enjoying himself.

The Doctor could say nothing in reply. He let his eyes do the talking. Entire races had quailed before this infamous gaze but the Master was unaffected.

"She really is quite pretty, isn't she?" he asked, gazing at her limp form. "Of course, she'll look much prettier once she's had a shower and straightened her hair, or whatever it is that these women do to themselves. Lucy organised her rooms," he went on. "She probably wasn't so keen on the idea at first, not that she'd ever say, but who listens to humans anyway?"

The Doctor's silence stretched on.

"I do hope they get on," the Master said. "I can't have any cat-fighting now, can I?"

Still no response.

"Ah well, it's all for the best." He motioned to his bully-boys to unlock the cage and drag Rose out.

The Doctor couldn't help it; he moved to block their way to her. "Please," he said, low and urgent.

The men glanced at each other, just for a second, but it was enough provocation for the Master to brandish his laser screwdriver threateningly.

"Please," he echoed, sardonically.

Decided, one of the guards knocked the Doctor forcibly out of the way, pushing him to the filthy floor while the other went to pick up Rose. It had to be at that moment that she woke up, bleary-eyed and barely conscious, but awake all the same. The Doctor and the Master noticed at the same time.

"Rose," the Doctor said, at the same time that the Master said, "Rose, dear! So glad you're joining us just in time for your move."

She only blinked, struggling to understand her surroundings, still weak.

"Well, let's crack on then," the Master said. "Off we go!"

"Doctor..." Rose croaked. The word was broken, dry, and a desperate plea for help.

The Doctor was on his feet on an instant, dodging around the brutish guard, but the latter was the stronger, and before the Doctor could reach her he was on the ground again, his head clanging noisily against the bars of the cage.

"Rose!"

But the door was already clanking shut, and Rose was carried hastily out of the room struggling with all the strength of a mouse, leaving only the Master, twirling the key on his finger, as witness to the Doctor's anguish.

"Oh, I am going to enjoy this," he whispered in a half-laugh.

It was so tempting to plead and beg and grovel, but the Doctor knew this would do nothing but inflate the Master's ego. Instead he simply turned away from his old friend and long term enemy. He heard the Master's contemptuous snort and then the footsteps echoing across the chic wood-panelled floor. Only when he was completely sure he was alone did he dare sink onto the mattress where Rose had been lying only minutes before and grit his teeth in frustration, rage, horror and terror.

_I am a Time Lord. I am a rational, logical creature. I do not break down at the slightest hint of trouble._ He repeated this mantra over and over in his head. The reason for doing so was twofold: first to keep himself composed and second to stop himself thinking about Rose.

It was hopeless; as soon as her name flitted through his subconscious he let out a strangled sound that was part sob, part gasp, part groan.

As soon as the Master had begun to scan her, the Doctor had feared this. He had thought of the possibility as soon as Rose had mentioned the fact that the TARDIS still translated for her, yet it wasn't until the Master had been flaunting that stupid laser screwdriver of his that the terrible ramifications had truly sunk in. Now, though, it was all too plain what was going to happen. The cold, cruel facts were lying like lead weights in his head, stubbornly refusing to leave.

Rose was going to be raped, impregnated against her will and forced to bear a child or several children for the Master, and those children would then continue his reign of terror across the universe.

Even if all went well and Martha returned in the shortest time possible (he was hoping the Master would be ready to attack in a year or so, which would give him ample time to infiltrate the Archangel network and her enough time to spread the message to enough people to make the difference), that was longer than a human gestation period. And who knew how fast a Gallifreyan foetus would develop? Though they were slow growing in comparison to humans, the Looms had produced children in mere minutes. If that was ingrained into the Master's DNA, then how many children could he produce in a year? How many babies would Rose find wrenched away from her and trained to hate the species of her birth?

The Doctor wasn't concerned at all about Rose's physical wellbeing during pregnancy and childbirth. The Master would take the utmost care of her body to preserve his new breeding machine. That didn't stop him being utterly terrified for her mental wellbeing.

Rape was up there with murder on so many planets other than Earth. Of course, there was the odd one that equated it with tweaking your nose (or equivalent thereof), but on Earth it was the second most heinous crime you could commit, and Rose was from Earth. He knew she had been in physical relationships before, even an abusive physical relationship when she was only sixteen (she had had a hard time convincing him not to find Jimmy Stone, wherever he was, and seriously damaging _his_ nose), but no matter what had happened to her before, there was no way that she could prepare for this. Rape by an alien? Rape by an alien whose arch-enemy you were in love with? Rape by an alien whose arch-enemy you were in love with for the express purpose of bearing children who would have their minds perverted from the moment they were born?

And there was the anger. The rage, the fury, the wrath, the ire, the maelstrom of anger.

There was the fear.


	6. That's how the devil works!

**CH6 That's how the devil works!**

Rose's first day alone was pretty boring. Tish brought her meals, which thankfully were actually palatable, but still refused to speak. She refrained from using the bathroom as much as she could, knowing there was a camera somewhere in there. Sadly, the Master hadn't provided anything much in the way of entertainment. No books, no paper or writing implements, no CDs or DVDs or whatever. So she spent the day mostly staring out of the window, curled up on the cushioned windowseat and trying not to wonder when the Master would arrive.

The Doctor's first day alone was unbearable. Tish brought him the same disgusting nourishment, but still refused to speak. He didn't dare pace around or otherwise betray his emotions, knowing there was a camera in the corner of the cage. Thankfully, he was left on his own. No visits from the Master's guards, any of the assorted staff except Tish, and no visits from the Master. So he spent the day mostly sat down on the mattress where Rose had spent her last night with him and tried not to wonder if the Master was with Rose right at that moment.

It was not until the evening that anything started to happen.

Rose was sitting on the windowseat as per usual, watching the sun descend steadily towards the horizon and disappear inexorably, and her mind had drifted back to Pete's world. At that particular moment she was wondering what Mickey and the guys were doing. Maybe they'd already been assigned another mission, maybe they were still on alert to see if she'd come back. She hoped Jackie wasn't too cut up about her leaving. At least she had Pete. And Toby. Even if Rose could never see him grow up...

Angrily, she sniffed back traitorous tears. She'd made her choice a long time ago.

The door swung open. Rose looked instinctively to see who it was. The Master walked in. He was dressed in expensive looking black silk pyjamas with a silk black robe slung casually over the top, a belt of the same material holding it together.

Rose stood up, years of training telling her to be ready for her adversary, even knowing that it would do no good now.

"Good evening, my dear," the Master said, faux-courteously, walking over to join her by the window.

Rose didn't say a word. What was there to say?

"And how have you found your quarters? To your liking, I hope?"

He was teasing her now, imitating a gracious concierge. _Please don't say he's into role-play. _Rose decided she'd deal with him how she'd always dealt with unfriendly aliens. She'd bluff him off.

"Yeah, they're alright. Not too keen on the pink. Bit stifling, y'know? And there's not much to do. Few books would be nice."

The Master eyed her patronisingly, but grudgingly admiring of her. No, admiring of her species, she amended. She wasn't impressing him in the least.

"Well, I'm sure I can do something about boredom," he smirked.

Oh God. Oh God.

"Yeah, about that," Rose said, fear lending her strength. "What's the plan? Breed off me, I guess. Then your kids will do what? They can hardly breed with each other, can they?"

"Actually, they can," the Master said, dismissively. "It was built in to our genetic make-up aeons ago. Essential for survival."

Damn. There went that loophole.

"Ok then, so the plan works. What about me? What's the gestation period for a Gallifreyan?"

The Master gazed out of the window beside her, but she didn't dare take her eyes off him. "I'm not entirely sure. You see, Time Lords weren't bred the... traditional way back on Gallifrey. We used Looms. Does what it says on the tin, really: weaves the genetic material together. That only took a minute or two. You know that the human gestation period is forty weeks. I'm guessing somewhere between the two. Personally, I'm hoping it's shorter, rather than longer. Much more efficient." He leered at her. "I'm sure I can find a way to shorten pregnancy, what with my being a genius."

Despite herself, Rose was sure he could, too.

"And what if I'm infertile?" she said. "You gonna lower yourself to try to breed with another human then?"

"You're not," he said simply. "Your scan showed you're in perfect working order. And you're not human, anyway."

"Yeah, I am," she argued. It was stupid, she knew. Getting him annoyed would do nothing, though it seemed he was implacable. He was such a master of any given situation that nothing seemed to affect him. "I've got my humanity, at least."

His mouth twisted into a little moue. "Word games are so unattractive," he complained. He looked her up and down, then. "You haven't made much of an effort for me, have you?"

Indeed she hadn't. In fact, she'd tried to do completely the opposite. She was wearing the jeans she'd first found and the blue t-shirt, too, which had a neckline even her grandmother would approve of. She'd also found a white jacket which she had buttoned up right up to her collarbones. Her hair, though now clean, had not been straightened or styled particularly, just pulled back into a short pony tail and she was wearing no make up.

She decided not to dignify his statement with a response.

"I suppose I can remedy that, though," the Master said, and he reached over to unbutton the jacket.

Rose had known this was coming. She had tried to prepare herself, but she could not prevent herself stepping back and folding her arms tightly over her chest.

"What if I refuse?" she blurted out. Stupid question, she knew, even as the words left her mouth.

He took a step towards her. She took a step back.

"Like you said, you're human." Another step. "Physically, at least. I'm stronger than you." Another. "Even if you were my species, you're female. I'd still be stronger than you." He was backing her against the bed, and she was moving with him, away from him. "And of course, the tables have turned on you and your precious Doctor, haven't they? What was it he said? That you were a great way to torture him without ever hurting him? Well I don't need him alive and well any more. I never did. He was just an amusement. But now I have you, what more amusement could I possibly want? So he becomes the torture method."

Rose's legs hit the bed. He caught her before she could fall, crushing her body close to his, slipping one leg between her two, holding their faces millimetres apart.

"You can refuse, of course," he whispered, his breath hot against her face. "But if you love the Doctor—and I can't see why you would—it wouldn't be the wisest thing to do."

It was so hard not to resist when he kissed her. Kissed was the wrong word; he assaulted her mouth with his. His tongue forced its way between her lips, licking her, tasting her, invading her. She stood there, silent and accepting, and trying not to remember that only two days before it had been her first kiss with the Doctor: beautiful, careful, loving. Her tongue lay limp in her mouth.

He pulled back. "And I'd make a little more effort than that."

Suddenly, he pushed her back so she hit the silken sheets, her lower legs still tangled with his. Before she had time to regain her bearings, his hands were at the buttons of her jacket again, tearing at them in his impatience.

"I want you to feel it," he growled. "I want you to feel how important this is. I want you to feel the earth shatter beneath you, making a whole new planet. I want you to feel the rise of New Gallifrey, created through you."

Rose lay like a stone as he finished with the buttons and yanked the jacket off her arms.

"Feel it," he urged again as his hands slipped under her t-shirt and began kneading her stomach.

The feel of his skin against her bare flesh was repulsive, but Rose found she could control her reactions. She remained utterly still where she could, but the battle was still raging between her consciousness and her instincts. Her head was telling her that the Doctor would have no way of resisting if he was tortured and that this was going to happen anyway so better not make it worse, but her heart was screaming at the violation of her body, the threat towards the Doctor and the feeling she couldn't shake of betraying him. Nevertheless she didn't let on. Her eyes were closed so she couldn't see _his _burning into her. She lifted her shoulders to allow him to slip the t-shirt off. She let herself be dragged to the centre of the bed. She let it happen.

"No," he commanded. "That's not good enough, Rose Marion Tyler."

What else could she do?

Only then did the true assault begin. Abruptly she felt his hands grabbing her face, clutching her skin with desperate fingers and her eyes flew open reflexively in shock to find his face only millimetres away. Unlike the Doctor, he kept his eyes wide open as he delved into her mind.

He was inside of her, prodding her, dredging up her deepest darkest thoughts, her fantasies, her dreams, her memories, the way she saw the world, he was everywhere. He thrust into her mind with the force of a wrecking ball, stabbing with a jagged blade at her puny human defences, and gaining complete control over her in a matter of mere seconds.

Rose felt him flood her entire body, and a wordless scream of horror echoed across their forced connection.

_That's better. So much passion. I want your anger. I want your fear. Fight it. Go on. Fight._

With every thought, she felt the emotion he was describing. She felt the passion which was hers to begin with, she felt the anger sweep her away, and she began grabbing at his clothes even as he pulled at her jeans, trying to pull him away from her and only serving to excite him. She felt the fear douse her in icy water and heard the cry emanate from her lips, only to be cut off as he covered her mouth with his own, and she fought him, she fought so hard. She pushed against him, she struggled, flailing arms and legs, she even hit at him, and when fighting him that way didn't work, she fought the only other way she knew: she kissed him back. Their tongues battled for dominance in his mouth, hers, she bit his lips and he did the same right back and the pain was invigorating, arousing. She pressed her body closer to his, trying to crush him, to stimulate him to a greater intensity than he could make her feel. Somehow she rolled them over and she was on top of him now, rubbing herself against him like a cat.

_That's it. Enjoy it. Kiss me like you want to. Feel the heat. Come closer to me._

His words evoked the strangest of feelings. She knew she was being controlled by him, and yet her temperature was rising, and her body was reacting to his hateful hands, and she was still kissing him, and her hands were stroking him even as his removed her bra and the sensation was delicious. It would be so easy to believe that she wanted this.

_Don't you?_

He placed the words into her mind with deliberation, stoking the fire that he was building there. A fire that she had never felt before. It was desperate lust, making her feel passionate and enraged and violent and frantic with the need for someone to touch her.

_For me to touch you._

She couldn't resist. He was a Time Lord and she was a human, and he had seen the passing of so many centuries and she had seen only two decades, and he was a man and she was a woman.

_Rose. You are unique. You are the only one of your kind in the history of the universe. Of all time. Don't you deserve this?_

He broke away from the kiss to seize her breast roughly and she moaned and arched into him.

_It's been so long since you had this. You've been dying for someone to squeeze you too tight, to burn you to a cinder._

Nothing but the truth.

_Rose. You don't just want this. You need this._

She couldn't fight him any longer. Her mind gave over entirely to the fire and her hands clawed at his silk shirt. It wasn't long before they were both gasping and panting and groaning each other's names and there were no barriers between them. Not physically, and never mentally.


	7. And some would go mad

**CH7 ...And some would go mad**

When Rose awoke, the first thing she felt was the pain. She was bruised all over, and very sore. Her flesh felt tender, and her mouth seemed swollen. Groaning slightly, she rolled her shoulders to loosen them up and pushed her tangled mane of hair out of her sticky eyes.

The next thing she felt was absolute horror.

"Good morning."

* * *

The Doctor was lying in his cell, working on the connection with the Archangel Network. He was starting to get the hang of how it worked, now. If he hooked up to _that_ signal, and if he could just divert _that _one a bit, just a smidgen... Of course, it all had to be a very gradual process. If the Master should twig, everything would be out the window, and everything Martha was doing would go to dust.

He wondered where Martha was at that moment, what she was doing. It had been three days now; was that enough time to get out of the country? He doubted it. There would be no one organised enough to ferry her across the Channel. She would have to start in England then, get round the UK. Maybe she could start off in Scotland or Wales, since the Master's lot would expect her to be in the general London area. She'd be smart enough to work all of that out.

Her family he'd seen working around the ship. Tish still brought him his meals, and Francine had come in at one point to dust. She had refused to speak either, and he had spent a futile ten minutes wondering whether she still blamed him for dragging Martha into this, or just the Master. Probably a bit of both. After all, he _had _got her involved. But he'd given her the choice... Anyway. He hadn't seen what-was-his-name, Martha's father, Clive? Probably he was working 'below deck', so to speak, doing some sort of manual job. No point worrying about the Joneses, really. He couldn't do anything for them, and at least they were being fed, clothed, given shelter and they were close by. Much better off than Martha.

What, then, about Jack? So far as he knew, he was locked up somewhere on board the Valiant. The Doctor didn't hold out much hope of seeing him until the year was up. The Master, vindictive madman that he was, would probably be passing the time by repeatedly killing him. When he wasn't with—

"Stop it, stop it," he whispered to himself.

There's the proof, he'd finally gone mad. Well, he'd known that years ago. Decades. Since, what, his fourth body? Well, his fourth for certain. That scarf was completely bananas. How on earth Sarah Jane had managed to put up with it and all its mothballs, he didn't know.

Where was Sarah Jane? She lived somewhere in Croydon, he thought, or had she moved? Was she one of those unfortunates the Master had decimated? He sincerely hoped not, even if everything went to plan and he could destroy the paradox machine (he stopped himself calling it the TARDIS) and all those killed would hopefully be brought back (he wished he had some wood to touch). If she was still alive, Sarah Jane would probably be out forming a resistance, with whatever was left of Jack's Torchwood team, and UNIT members who'd escaped the massacre, and all those brilliant people out there who would join in the fight just because someone had to do it. Maybe she'd meet Martha. Sarah Jane would be a great help. So long as they got on. Oh, but they would. Martha wouldn't be as minded to be as jealous as...

Oh, it was no use trying not to think about her. She was in most of his subconscious thoughts, even if he could control his rambling consciousness to some degree, which he'd just proved he couldn't.

Was she alright? What did the Master's absence mean? Was he satisfied with her? Was he treating her too badly?

How badly was she hurt?

He knew she was hurt because... well she had to be. Until yesterday evening, he could have felt her pain, just a little, just that slight tugging on his mind, the echo of their mental conversation of two days ago, the tiny sense of her that he couldn't help but cling to. Now though, there was nothing. He had felt the connection simply snap, violently enough to surprise him, late yesterday evening. He hoped against hope that that wasn't because her mind was no longer emotionally strong enough to support it. There had to be another rational reason, and no doubt he could find it if he wasn't distracted by the idea of her pain.

He toyed with the idea of opening the connection again and just asking her—it would be more difficult without the physical proximity and the physical connection, but not impossible. After all, they were so closely connected anyway—but he decided not to. He told himself it was because he didn't want to waste energy when he needed his mental faculties about him to infiltrate the Network, and he told himself that maybe it was better that he didn't just interrupt her in the middle of whatever she might be doing, but he knew that a large part of him just didn't want to face her pain. Not just 'didn't want to'. _Couldn't_.

And then...

What if she wasn't in pain at all? He had heard them last night—how could he not, when the Master had placed her room only metres away from this one? Rose wouldn't know that, but the Doctor knew that it was a deliberate jab by the Master. And last night... she had sounded... he couldn't think it. She told him she loved him—she couldn't have _enjoyed _it. Surely. No, their connection couldn't have broken because she no longer felt anything towards him. _Couldn't._

He'd always sort of shied away from that emotional stuff. He didn't do goodbyes (unless forced), he didn't do domestic (again, unless forced). The confession he'd made to Rose had been the product of months on end of grief and pain, and the knowledge that if he'd had only two seconds more, she'd've known. Plus, at the time he thought he had a year stuck with her in a very small enclosed space. Best get that kind of thing out in the open, and quickly. But no matter how he 'didn't do' emotion, it didn't stop him feeling it. Oh, he felt it alright. That was why he didn't indulge in it. How long would it take him to go mad as the Master himself?

Judging by his reaction to this situation, he estimated about three weeks. Possibly two and a half.

* * *

Rose was now sitting against the pillows with her knees hugged close to her chest, wrapped in silk sheets while he swaggered around the room to find his strewn pyjamas.

"Best not go wondering round naked, there'd be women fainting all over the place," he said breezily, snagging the shirt from somewhere by the window (how had she even thrown it that far?) and thankfully tugging it on.

Rose didn't say a word.

"You know, I feel quite hungry this morning. All that energy we used up last night, eh?" He didn't even glance at her. "I hope Martha's mum's a good cook. She's on kitchen duties in the morning. Wouldn't care to join me for breakfast, darling?"

This time, he did throw her a casual glance, to see her face unchangingly frozen into stone. "Oh, come on. You enjoyed it."

"I didn't have a choice," she whispered, breaking her silence against her will.

"A _choice_? Who ever has a choice? It's instinctive, isn't it? No one has a choice but to feel what they're feeling. And you were so feeling it last night."

"Only because you made me."

He leered. "Well, I knew I was good."

She didn't bother to reply. She would never win an argument against him, she knew that.

He finished tying up his robe, and moved to the door. "I'll see you later, then," he said suggestively.

"Master," she said, hating the way that sounded.

"What?" he asked, and she wondered if she had used up all his patience.

"Can I see the Doctor?" she asked. "Please," she added hurriedly, hoping she could soften him up that way.

"No," he said. "What good would that do you?"

"Peace of mind?" she suggested. "Stop me having a mental breakdown? Keep up my strength for..." _the rape or the pregnancy, take your pick._

"No," he said again.

"Please," she begged.

"No!"

She shrank back, scared. Maybe that touched him a little, because he paused before slamming the door.

"You want company. I'll send Lucy round."

He shut the door, still more firmly than was strictly necessary, and there was a telltale _click_ as the lock shut back into place.

Rose managed to wait about thirty seconds before throwing the sheets off her bruised naked body and rushing for the bathroom to take a scalding shower. She knew there were cameras everywhere, but there would be for the entire time that she was in here, and he'd seen everything last night anyway. No point in prudishness now.

The water was soon cascading down, saturating her hair, pouring off her burning skin and she scrubbed at herself until she was red raw, but still she felt disgusting. It was such a cliché. Everything she'd ever heard about rape victims mentioned this: you couldn't feel clean afterwards. She guessed there was a reason it became clichéd as she poured too much shampoo into her palm, so it spilled over her hand and dripped down the plughole before she scrubbed the rest of it over her head, trying not to remember his hands running through her hair, dragging her nails over her own scalp to stop any memories of pleasure.

The pleasure was the worst thing. She _had _enjoyed it; she couldn't deny it. Her body had thrilled to his touch, her mind had given up protesting after only seconds. She was horrified that she had _enjoyed _herself last night, and she was horrified that she had been trying to ensure that _he _enjoyed himself, too.

She shook her head forcibly, letting the water blind her as it poured into her open eyes, wishing it could flood her brain and wash the memories away. It wasn't working. She grabbed the soap again, scoured her skin again. After a long while, though, the hot water ran out. She felt like screaming. That was the sort of annoying thing that used to happen back on the Powell Estate, where they couldn't afford to keep the boiler on for too long. She hadn't used up the hot water in years. Then again, she didn't know how long she'd been in the shower, trying to divert her thoughts and remove several layers of skin.

Frustrated, she wrenched the knob that controlled the water flow, almost pulling it off, but stopping the jet of now icy water. She grabbed one of the powder blue towels and tried to scrape herself dry, but they were too luxuriously soft, caressing her abused skin in ways that were disgusting to her now. As quickly as she could, she moved onto her hair, wringing it out, violently rubbing the wretched towel over her scalp. When she was passably dry, she gave up with the towel and went over to the closet to fetch some clothes. She found herself putting as many layers on as possible, though what she was trying to achieve, she didn't know. Some sort of protection—as if that would stop him. She could have laughed at herself; she was the model of a rape victim, and it was the first time in a long while that Rose had counted herself as typical.

Now fully dressed, she remained utterly stationary in the closet for a long while, wondering what on earth she was going to do with herself. There was still the issue of no entertainment in this room, and she doubted she could have settled herself to anything anyway. What she really wanted was someone to talk to. The Doctor should obviously be first choice, but... she really wanted her mum. Rape (she still shuddered to think the word, let alone say it out loud) wasn't a subject a girl could really talk to a guy about. And Jackie had helped her through so many crap relationships before. She remembered dimly the day when she'd turned up back at the flat with a backpack full of clothes, a bruised face and a debt of hundreds of pounds, escaping Jimmy Stone. Jackie had been an angel then. She wasn't anything hugely special, but she was her mum. And she was one of the only things the Doctor was scared of. It made Rose smile a weak smile to imagine Jackie slapping the Master and telling him to keep his filthy hands off her little girl.

But Jackie wasn't here now. Jackie was a universe away, wondering if that little girl had found her way back to her true love yet.

Another scream of frustration was born and buried instantaneously. Rose wondered how long it would take to drive her mad in this living hell. Three weeks? Maybe two and a half.


	8. What about the wife?

CH8 What about the wife?

Lucy Saxon née Cole was having the worst week of her life. _Saxon_, she scoffed. It wasn't even a real name. She was a fool to have taken it. But then she was a fool to have married him, she knew that now.

The young Lucy Cole had led a sheltered life. She attended Rodean School for girls in her youth, and she was never too interested in her studies. She could play netball to a semi-professional standard, the product of a lack of social life that was inherent with overprotective rich parents, and she thought she had a flair for languages, going on to study Italian at St Andrews, but it was all funded by her father, and she still had doubts that she had actually been accepted into the university. It did seem that an awful lot of money came in whilst she was there.

But Lucy never thought to worry too much about that. If she was going up in the world, she was hardly about to complain.

University was a lark. The work was hard, of course, almost excruciating, but it was her first taste of excitement. St Andrews was a whole country away from her overbearing father, and it did not have the same strict rules as Rodean to keep her away from the opposite sex. It was at uni that Lucy discovered the slightly darker, more thrilling world of socialising, alcohol for the sake of alcohol, flirting with your professor to stop him hauling you over the coals for handing in yet another assignment three months late. She discovered that she could be alluring, and she discovered she liked to be so. Netball fell by the wayside and her Italian slipped drastically, but she still clawed a relatively good degree out of her three years there. It was probably her father's doing, but by this stage she really didn't care.

After uni, life got slightly more difficult. Up until that point, she'd never had to make a decision to do with her life. Her parents sent her to Rodean; they recommended St Andrews. Italian was the only possible choice for the subject. Now, she found herself without occupation, without purpose, and with no need to get a job. What with all the money that had been put aside for her, she had no need to work at all, for the rest of her life. Her brother and sisters quietly assumed she would become the arm candy of some minor political figure or a footballer, and Lucy was inclined to think so too. Not that she would ever admit it to her sisters, seven and nine years older than her and very patronising, as she saw it, or to her brother, who was five years older than her and had never taken any sort of interest in her life at all. No, to the world, Lucy Cole protested that she was going to make a difference. She was going to change the world.

"Just watch me," she used to say. "One day, I'll change the world."

It was that notion that first got her interested in charity work. She started off small, volunteering in local charities, but it was never enough. How could she change the world when she was only helping a dozen old age pensioners, or a score of children at a care home? She moved up the ranks, quickly becoming involved in national charities, then worldwide. She donated both her money and her time, tying her life into the hardships of thousands of people, some of whom would remember Lucy Cole as the determined young girl who had changed their lives.

Her looks and her charm played a key role in her charity work. She became the face of many a television advert, made touching documentaries in which she contrasted beautifully with the poverty-stricken wretches she strived to help. She flirted with wealthy peers of the realm, businessmen, anyone who could donate money to whatever cause she was championing at the time. She never once felt she was selling herself. For a start, she never let it get that far, and for another, what did it matter so long as she changed the world? She was beginning to believe herself that she could do it. Just look at what she had done already!

Yet it was never enough. Oh look, there's one more child in Africa with a mosquito net, big deal. It frustrated her beyond belief to know that there were millions more, dying needlessly. And really, what good would saving _all _those children do? They would just grow up to make the overpopulation of the world worse, and then there wouldn't be enough food or mosquito nets for countless future generations, and then the whole problem would just begin again.

After less than five years of working for charity, she couldn't take the futility any more. She moved on, this time to publishing. A contact from St Andrews got her a job, not one with any particular standing, but it was the job that meant it was her who the mysterious Harold Saxon met first when he went to publish his autobiography, nearly one and a half years ago.

He had intrigued her from the start. Unlike most people, he didn't make his first contact with the company via an email or a telephone call, or through an agent. He just walked into the office one day with his manuscript, and within twenty minutes, everyone was falling at his feet, promising to publish this book which promised to be so magnificent.

Amid the chaos, he stood there, watching the flustered humans and exuding superiority, amusement, and most of all _power_. Lucy was not flustered. She watched him quietly, knowing that she had been wrong. She could not change the world. It was this sort of man who could do that. Just look at him, she thought to herself. Such presence, such charisma. _He _could convince the entire world to worship him if he wanted.

He was still relatively unknown at this point, she recalled. He had only just begun his job at the Ministry of Defence; he had only just installed the Archangel Network. His aura of perfection was only just established and yet he seemed used to it, the adoration.

She adored him, too. She couldn't help it. Who was she to resist the raw power he exuded? And Lucy did what she did best. She flirted with him whilst going over the finer details of publishing, trying to gain his power, to monopolise it. It worked only too well. He was used to women flirting with him, and he invited her back to his luxury London apartment that very evening. It was then that Lucy Cole sealed her fate.

_She refused him._

She knew that in order to catch a man, you must never let him believe that _he _has caught _you._ So she merely batted her eyelids and told him that she never went that far on a first date. At first he was flabbergasted, and then he was angry, and then he was suspicious, and finally he settled on being amused with this human woman who dared to refuse his bed. He closed in on her, telling her that he was sure he could impress her. She replied softly, daintily, that she was sure of that too, but he would need to impress her before she went that far.

He snapped. He grabbed her around the waist and pulled her outside, round the back of the snazzy apartment block to the TARDIS. He showed her the alien spaceship, the dimensionally transcendental time machine, certain that this would impress such a puny human girl, and while she did blink a few times and maybe even gasped once, she was so aware of him watching her that she barely reacted at all. Unlike the other girls who had been shown the TARDIS, she did _not_ breathe "it's bigger on the inside". She did not run out again to trail her fingers across the four wooden walls. She turned to Mr Saxon and said, "It would be a lot more impressive if you could actually work it."

Incensed, he flew her to the end of the universe. He took her outside, into the barren wastelands of Malcassairo, showed her the deserted conglomerations of the Malmooth. She stared in horror at the end of life, and he smiled. She stared with horror at him, and he smirked. She jumped and screamed a little when she heard the rocket blasting off behind them, and encouraged by this small reaction from the otherwise mute young woman, he took her back inside the TARDIS and landed her on board the rocket, seconds before the launch. The filthy refugees, so hopeful, so grateful for the aid they had needed so desperately to survive, reminded her forcibly of her work in Africa. Nothing had changed, not even after a hundred trillion years. A whole universe had burnt itself out, and nothing had changed. Nothing ever would. She would never change the world.

She didn't realise she had spoken this last sentiment out loud until he took her hand. It was such a different gesture to all the seductive or domineering moves he had made before that it shocked her.

"But we can," he said.

"How?"

Then he explained. His birthplace, his species, a small part of his history. The TARDIS, the Doctor, the end of the universe. His home. Her home. The way they would become one.

"Earth will become Gallifrey, and Gallifrey will become Earth," he told her, slowly placing the words in her mind to burn there with the fervent flames of his voice. "We'll change the universe from there, from then, and we can stop all of this."

Before he had even finished the last sentence, she believed him whole-heartedly. There was the potential there for the beginning of a universe that any species would be honoured to live in. If it meant the deaths of a few for the good of many, surely it was worth it. Maybe he hypnotised her, maybe he didn't. Maybe Archangel had already convinced her of who he was, even though she was far outside its range now. But whatever the reason behind it, when they returned to modern day London, she saw no further reason to refuse him anything. Within days they were man and wife. Within weeks he had set up his own political party. Within months the Prime Minister was forced to call an election. Within the year, the Master was Prime Minister of Great Britain, and the world watched as he celebrated his inevitable victory with a kiss with his adoring wife.

Throughout that period, Lucy became the Master's greatest weapon. She presented a perfect image to the world: a clever, pretty young woman who was obviously dedicated to charitable organisations and would always support her husband. She attended press conferences with him, smiled proudly at him whenever he spoke, gave interviews to support his cause, visited schools and hospitals in his name. Though no one ever remembered her, they were the perfect partnership. In the comfort of their home they were happy, too. He enjoyed having someone to talk to about his masterly plans, she loved lapping his words up. She was witty enough to keep him interested in her, sexy enough to stop him straying, but modest enough to let him take the lead in everything, demure enough to obey his every word. They were both intoxicated with the idea of taking over the world and remoulding it into the dream he had conjured up.

When the dream was realised, Lucy was overwhelmed by the triumph of it. The paradox machine was in place and working, the Toclafane were descending and the sky was wrenched open. The world was dancing to their bidding. Even the Doctor, who had tried to thwart her husband so many times before, was caged like an animal and his pitiful girlfriend was there with him.

Lucy hadn't had much to do with Rose before her unveiling. She knew she was there, the Master having gleefully recounted the tale of her arrival to her as soon as he had her tied up. She had even seen her when she was moved out of the TARDIS to her hiding place behind the wall of the flight deck. The impression she'd gained then was less than endearing. A pathetic girl to have allowed herself to be caught in such a manner. An idiotic girl to love such a one as the Doctor, who strove to change nothing, in fact to keep things as they were. And above all, she was just one in six billion, soon to be one in five billion, four hundred million. She was just another human.

Plus, the Doctor and Rose obviously didn't have the same relationship as the Master and herself. Rose, as she understood it, had been weaker in the partnership. While Lucy knew that every bit of attention was focussed on Harry, she also knew that he valued her above every other human on planet Earth. He had never picked up dozens of girls and dropped them, like the Doctor had. She meant more to the Master than Rose had ever meant to the Doctor. As far as love stories went, theirs was a rather rubbish one.

She couldn't help but feel a tiny twinge of guilt when they were reunited, though. The way they stared at each other, despairing as they met for the first time in years... but she shook herself and told herself not to be so emotional. It was easy to forget the pair of them, watching the Toclafane tumble from the rendered sky, watching in triumph the surrender of the world. The pair of them were both utterly saturated with victory, staring out of the window at their new universe. Lucy was captivated by the beauty of it. She was changing the world.

It was only after that wonderful, glorious moment that things started to go wrong.

Harry had been more obsessed with his new prisoners than she really would have liked. The guards could have taken care of them, she was sure, and did he really have to sit and watch the Doctor and Rose on a widescreen television monitor constantly? He only joined her in bed that night for half an hour at most, and their lovemaking was rough and hurried. Afterwards, he had left her to fall asleep alone, and he had continued to watch the monitor.

She had lain in bed, watching him watch them, and after a while her annoyance began to show through.

"Are you going to watch that all night?" she asked petulantly.

He had turned back to her, not liking the tone of her voice. "I'm going to do exactly as I please," he said lightly, with just a touch of menace. "I'm the Master of this world, now. That includes you."

The way he tagged on that last sentence made her shiver. The way he callously disregarded her as just another subject, or worse, slave; she was under no illusion about what was happening to humanity beneath her feet. Was that to be her future, too? She slipped into a restless sleep, still scared.

The next day, her world dissolved.

She woke up to find the Master (it was already becoming harder to call him Harry) leaving the room.

"Where are you going?" she asked drowsily, expecting to go with him.

"The bridge," he answered shortly. "You can stay there. Someone will bring you food."

She puzzled silently over his tone. He sounded excited, almost frenzied, the way he had been when he had become Prime Minister, or when the Toclafane descended. But before she had time to think on it further, he left, closing the door firmly behind him.

Lucy got up only a minute or two later when the girl Tish brought her breakfast. She thanked her cursorily, distracted, eating the food without really tasting it. She moved over to the large window in her room, and sat on the windowseat, staring out at the endless blue, and wondering what was going on. It only took her minutes to realise that she could find out. The Master had not disconnected the monitor he had been watching all night.

Suddenly desperate to know what was happening, Lucy hurried over to the luxury armchair in front of the screen and flicked the on switch, perching on the chair guiltily, as if she didn't belong. There was no dramatic flicker of static before the image came up; this technology was cutting edge and perfect. The picture was as clear as daylight, full as it was of darkness.

Lucy's viewpoint was from one corner of the cage, behind the Doctor's head as he stared through the bars. He was just a little to the side so she could see past him, through the bars to the thrashing girl, twitching grotesquely on the floor. On the Doctor's other side was her husband, pointing his laser screwdriver at the girl, Rose, and smiling sadistically, amused by the agony he was inflicting. Lucy found herself recoiling back into the chair. Death was one thing: quick, painless deaths. Even slower deaths, she could deal with. But this.... this _torture_, for no reason...

She couldn't tear her eyes away for the full ten minutes that it carried on. Seeing the bars between herself and Rose, herself and the Master made her feel as though she was caged, too, trapped with the Doctor, watching an innocent girl suffer untold pain.

After that, she almost didn't care that her husband was kissing another woman. She felt faint as she listened to the conversation which was deciding Rose's fate, understanding that this woman's torture was to continue forever.

_This is silly_, she said to herself. There was a point to it, wasn't there? This was for the greater good. It was just like what the rest of the world was suffering. Just a bit of pain, a bit of work for the future of their new universe. And yet it was the first time she'd seen the Master directly inflicting this pain on a woman who had never even tried to stop him in any way, and enjoying it.

_I won't think of it_, she decided. _It's necessary. It's for his species. The continuation of a species. Isn't that worth it?_

That resolve continued until the Master returned to her room. The television was still on, and she was still sitting in the chair, staring at the Doctor cradling Rose. How had she doubted their love? A few tears escaped down her cheeks, matching those of the Doctor.

The Master walked in, saw Lucy watching the desolate pair, and smiled. "You saw that then," he said. It wasn't a question. There was no worry in his voice, no concern for her, for them.

She nodded.

"Good!" he said, and clapped his hands to punctuate it. "Then you know what the situation is. You can start preparing her room. She can have the one next door, it's big enough. I was going to use it as a second room, but then I suppose it will be, for me! Pink," he decided. "Her name's Rose, let's go for pink. Do the bathroom in whatever colour you like. You're about the same size. Order some clothes for her. Only the best. Someone'll go down and raid the designer stores. You just find the things you want to get."

Lucy could only nod, blankly. The tears had stopped now, but she was still shellshocked.

"Get to it, then," he said, and left again. To do what, she had no idea.

To her surprise, she found herself enjoying the creation of Rose's new room. Interior decorating wasn't one of her areas of expertise, but it was nice to be doing something productive, and she tried to make the room as nice as she could for the unfortunate young woman. She started to feel an affinity for her, especially as the new pink cushion cover for the windowseat went on. Maybe Rose would sit here, just as she liked to do next door, and watch the world go by. The least she could do for the captive was this. A team went back down to what remained of Oxford Street and brought her back any clothes she specified. She abided by the Master's decisions, sticking mainly to pink, but made sure there was at least a little variation. A little blue, which matched the bathroom she had decorated, purples, too, mainly girly colours to make Rose feel optimistic. That was the intention, anyway.

That evening, though, the Master came in to see what she had achieved.

"Not bad," was his verdict. "But I want a bigger bed," he decided. "Nice idea, like the silk, but I want whatever the biggest size of bed is. And get her another dressing table. Women like that sort of thing."

"Yes—" she said, but stopped. Yes, who? Yes, Harry? That wasn't who he was. Yes, dear? She couldn't say that, not today.

"Yes, what?" he asked, as though reading her mind. Maybe he was.

"Yes, Master," she said quietly.

He smiled, condescendingly. "Good girl. Shame you couldn't get it right first time. I wanted her installed by tonight. I suppose I can wait one more day."

He spun on his heel, leaving her to contemplate his attitude to her, and his attitude to Rose. That was when it really hit her.

He was going to use Rose for breeding. He wanted a bigger bed. He was going to cheat on her, and there was absolutely nothing she could do about it. She was a fool not to have thought about this earlier, maybe while she was ordering underwear for the girl, but she had suppressed the idea, buried it like the proverbial ostrich. Only now did it hit home that she was an idiot. She should never have married him. He didn't care for her in the slightest; she was just a tool. She was nothing more than Rose, and perhaps she was less. Yes, she was definitely less than Rose, now. Rose still served a purpose. Lucy was redundant, now. Expendable.

She lay in her bed alone all night after a numb day of organisation, hearing the passionate cries from the room next door, and never once did a tear escape her eyes. She was too numb.

Yes, the world was changing. But not for the better.


	9. Knock knock

CH9 Knock knock

Rose was sitting on the windowseat when the gentle knock on the door came. She didn't bother to say 'come in' or anything equally as pointless, because it was either going to be Tish, who would come in anyway, or the Master being sarcastic, and she couldn't bear to say another word to him.

"Hello? Can I come in?"

Rose frowned. She didn't recognise the voice, never having heard her speak before. Of course, she had spoken on the bridge on that day of reckoning, but Rose had hardly been paying attention to anyone but the Doctor.

"Um, okay," she said, slightly nervous, but mostly just curious. Who on board this ship would actually bother to ask her anything?

Lucy turned the key in the lock, and let herself in, to see Rose sitting, just as she had imagined, on the windowseat, in the exact spot where she herself liked to sit next door. Rose was dressed in a long sleeved pink top and dark jeans, and she was wearing leather boots, even though there was no possibility of her leaving the room and the heating was at the perfect level for a human being, and probably just a little too hot for a Time Lord. _Gallifreyan_, Lucy corrected herself.

"Hello," Lucy said. "I'm Lucy. But you probably knew that," she added, feeling strangely self-conscious.

"Yeah, I did," Rose agreed, slightly harsher than was strictly necessary. "And I won't even bother telling you my name."

She turned away, staring out the window. Right now, the last thing she wanted was to talk to the woman who had married the man raping her, the woman who had smiled at the sight of herself in a cage. She chastised herself for being interested in anyone at the door.

Lucy shifted a little, uncomfortably. This was not what she'd expected from a woman who'd been tortured bodily and mentally. She knew exactly what would have passed last night; it was clear that Rose loved the Doctor and so would not accept willingly. The moans of pleasure must have been forced, faked, or worse. Unable to sleep, Lucy had put a great deal more thought than was comfortable into the conundrum, and realised exactly how far the Master would be invading Rose. Therefore, she'd expected a broken girl, a woman with a tearstained face and shuddering breaths, on the edge of hysteria. Instead, Rose seemed almost belligerent. _She must be so strong._

Lucy recoiled at the instinctive thought. Why was she trying to sympathise with the girl who had blundered in and destroyed her marriage? Even if she could see now that it was never much of a marriage.

"Harry said you wanted company," she said, trying to convince herself that this was the only reason she had come. No curiosity towards the girl, no sympathy.

Rose grimaced. "Actually, no offence or anything, I didn't say anything of the sort."

There was an awkward pause. "Do you mind if I sit down?" Lucy said.

"Go ahead," Rose replied, nodding towards the empty half of the windowseat.

Lucy did so, and each found herself staring at the other for another long moment, the silence stretching out like a tense elastic band. It had to snap at some point.

"I'm sorry, I shouldn't—" Lucy began at the same time as Rose said, "Oh, this is ridiculous."

"What?" they both asked at the same time, and both started giggling. The tension was affecting them both badly; it was inevitable that it would be broken in such a ridiculous manner.

"Well, I was going to say that us sitting here like lemons was ridiculous," Rose informed Lucy.

"I was going to say that I shouldn't impose on you like this," Lucy replied.

"Oh, no, it's alright really," Rose said. "S'pose it's better than going mad from having no one to talk to."

A trace of the bitterness had returned, and Lucy recoiled slightly. "I'm sorry," she said, but Rose was already shaking her head.

"It's not your fault, any of it. Well, it might be, but if I start blaming you, I'll never have a civil conversation with you." She smiled ruefully. "Sorry, I'm being rude."

"No, that's... quite understandable," Lucy said.

Rose looked at Lucy, assessing her with her eyes. "How much do you know? I mean, I'm assuming all of it, but he is your husband, I don't want to mention something tactless, y'know?"

Lucy looked away. "I think I know everything. I was... I was watching while he scanned you," she confessed. "He has a monitor in the bedroom, and I wanted to know what was going on."

"Nice," Rose commented dryly.

Lucy laughed bitterly. "No. I just couldn't look away, if you know what I mean."

Rose nodded sympathetically. "Yeah, I get you." She paused for a second, wondering whether or not asking the next question would spoil any chance of an amicable acquaintanceship, then decided to bite the bullet. "You know what happened last night?"

It was half a question, half a statement. Lucy nodded. "I'm in the room next door," she said, gesturing. "Even if I hadn't known, I heard."

Rose looked severely nauseated. "Oh my god, I'm so sorry."

"No, don't be," Lucy hastily assured her. "I know what he can do, I know..."

The young woman cut herself off and grimaced. Rose was struck by the difference between the beautiful, composed girl she had seen a few days ago and the tortured woman who sat before her now.

"Sorry, I'm going to be rude again," she warned Lucy. "But why on earth did you marry him? Did he force you?"

"No!" Lucy exclaimed. "Stupid, idiot girl that I was, I said yes."

Rose didn't say anything, knowing Lucy would tell her anyway.

"He said he loved me. He told me who he was; he hadn't told anyone else before. He was... amazing. So charming, so mischievous, always putting himself right at the top of the pecking order without even trying. I couldn't _not_ love him. Anyone would have fallen for him. He took me to the end of the universe in his ship; who else could do that?"

"The Doctor's ship," Rose corrected her. "He stole it."

"I knew that, but he told me the Doctor had stolen it in the first place. And the Doctor had stopped him so many times in the past, stopping him changing the world. For the better," she added. "Everything the Master's done, everything he's doing, he genuinely believes it's for the better. He's rebuilding his lost home, joining the peoples of Earth and Gallifrey together."

"Did you never wonder about his methods?" Rose asked.

Lucy's face showed her chagrin. "It was for the greater good. If one person had to die to save a thousand others..."

"Maybe that one would have saved the thousand by themselves," Rose argued.

Lucy shook her head. "You couldn't tell him that. He's utterly convinced."

"But so were you? How?" Rose asked incredulously.

"He's a Time Lord. He always said he knew what was best for the future. Who was I to argue with time? And he showed me the end of the universe, everything bleak and dead or dying. He said he could change that."

"He lied," Rose said. "You can't just change time where you want to. I learnt that the hard way." She saw the question in Lucy's eyes. "I tried to save my father. He died when I was tiny; I asked the Doctor to take me back to see him, but I couldn't stop myself. Nearly unravelled the whole of time."

"What's your story?" Lucy blurted out. "I don't know anything about who you are. Just..."

"_What_ I am," Rose finished. "Fair enough. Well, I was born in London, on the Powell Estate, lived with my mum. Like I said, my dad died. Skipping all the boring stuff, I met the Doctor when I was nineteen. He blew up my job," she smiled.

"But I don't understand," Lucy said. "He was changing time, wasn't he? Why was he right and the Master wrong?"

Rose sighed. "Cos the Doctor was trying to put things back the way they were supposed to be. Saving the Earth from living plastic, that time. Do you remember that? Shop dummies coming to life? Must be a good few years ago, now. I'm so out of sync."

Lucy shook her head.

"Ah well, they hushed it up. Said it was a hoax or something, like they always do. So skipping the details, he asked me to go travelling with him. I said no at first—can you believe it?—but then he told me he could travel in time. And I said yes."

Her eyes were shining now with the memories. "I travelled with him for a good couple of years, I guess. No way of really knowing how much time I spent on the TARDIS, and then there was the way he made me skip a year accidentally. I have no idea how old I actually am. But anyway, that's not important. Um, right, what bits do you really need to know?" she asked rhetorically. "This is so hard to describe. Basically, I kind of absorbed the Time Vortex at one point. Don't ask. The Doctor got it out of me, nearly killing himself in the process, but you don't need to know that. We think that's where the Gallifreyan gene, bug, whatever, came from.

"But we didn't realise anything was different. I mean, one heart and all that, no way we would have known to check. And it was all a bit stressful at the time, what with the Doctor... recovering. So, anyway, next bit you need to know, we visited a parallel world. It was s'posed to be impossible, but that's the Doctor for you. And Mickey—he's my ex-boyfriend, now colleague and best friend—stayed in that world. Um, and my dad was still alive there, but I didn't exist. Sorry, this is really confusing," she apologised.

"I'm keeping up so far," Lucy said.

"Anyway, me and the Doctor came back to this world, and we thought that was it, we'd never see the parallel world again. But... do you remember the Battle of Canary Wharf? I think that's what they called it."

Lucy nodded.

"We were in the middle of that. The Cybermen, that's the robot men, they came from the parallel world. They punched their way through. Well, they followed the Daleks. They were..."

"The other ones," Lucy finished.

Rose grinned. "Yeah. Anyway, so it was possible to get back to the parallel world, and the Doctor was trying to send me through, so I'd be safe. He was going to pull all the Cybermen and Daleks into the Void—that's the gap in between worlds—but because we'd been across the Void before, we were sort of contaminated. With Voidstuff, or so he called it. We'd get pulled in too. My mum went through, because my dad was alive there, and Mickey had his life there, but I didn't want to, because... well, I had to stay with him. I loved him. I never had a choice, not really.

"But it went wrong. I slipped. Couldn't hold on tight enough, I was gonna fall into the Void. I remember knowing that I was gonna get trapped in a place where there was nothing, no time, no air, nothing, and we were both screaming, him and me, knowing that there was no way I'd escape this one."

"But..."

"Hang on a minute, I'll get there. My dad—from the parallel world, but I call him my dad, cos really, he is—jumped across to this world and brought me back to his world. We unofficially named it after him, called it Pete's World. He didn't know I was falling, it was just luck, and my mum being so desperate to get me back, but he did it, he caught me, and he saved me. Not that I was particularly grateful. I knew there was no way back, and I'd never see the Doctor again. Nah, I was an absolute brat, didn't thank him or anything. At the time."

Rose sighed. "Anyway, I was devastated. But a couple of months later, the Doctor sent a message through, to say goodbye. He projected a hologram of himself through the last little gap, on a beach in Norway just to tell me goodbye. I... I told him I loved him. First time I'd ever said it, and I thought it'd be the last, too. He faded away before he could answer." She grinned. "You have no idea how long I spent wondering if he would've said it back.

"So life went on. Got a job dealing with aliens, usually unwelcome ones. And then Torchwood, I don't know if you know about them, they're the people I work for, started developing what we called a Dimension Cannon. I volunteered to test it, because I was the only one who'd risk getting stranded in a random parallel dimension, just in case it was the right one. I did take precautions. I demanded we tested it on that beach in Norway, Bad Wolf Bay, because I knew there had been a gap there, and... But anyway, it worked. I got through. And got caught straight away by the Master. And you know the rest."

"Wow," Lucy said. "That's... quite a tale."

"Yeah," Rose smiled. "I'd write my memoirs if they wouldn't be banned immediately. Or if I could be bothered." Her face darkened slightly. "I suppose I've got the time."

Lucy frowned. "You really have nothing to do, do you? I'm sorry, I put this room together, I should have thought..."

"You did?" Rose asked. "I thought he would have got someone else to do it."

"I'm on a par with everyone else, now," Lucy reminded her. "You've essentially usurped me."

"Oh god, yeah I have, haven't I?" Rose realised. "Like a concubine. Ugh, this is disgusting." She looked at Lucy, realising something else. "You said you heard. Listen, I don't want you thinking that I wanted... _that_... in any way. I know what it sounded like, but—"

"Don't worry," Lucy interrupted. "I worked that out. He was in your mind, wasn't he?"

"He's done that to you?" Rose asked.

Lucy nodded. "The difference being that I wasn't complaining."

Rose chewed on the inside of her lip, a habit left over from being a normal teenager from a council estate in London. "Would you now?"

Lucy nodded, almost too fast.

"Really?" Rose asked. "I mean, it's like you said, it's all for the greater good. I'm just breeding Gallifreyan kids. What's the difference?"

"He's stopped pretending," Lucy said quietly. "He's not even trying to be Harry anymore. He's just the Master. Before, I was his partner. I helped his cause; I was actively doing something for him so he treated me well. That's why I thought he loved me. Now he doesn't need me for anything, especially now he's got you. He doesn't care about me at all." She laughed once, a bitter laugh. "I wish I'd known that when I first started flirting with him."

Rose nodded, and Lucy realised that she was being tested. "You can trust me, you know," she told her. "I'm not here to sell you out to him, or to hurt you."

"I know," Rose said. "Plus, there're cameras everywhere. He doesn't need you telling him what I said. I think there're three in the bathroom."

"That wasn't me," Lucy assured her. "That wasn't my orders."

"No, I believe you," Rose said. "That's all him."

There was a pause for a moment as they both reflected on how far the Master would actually go to prevent any privacy onboard the Valiant.

"Do you think," Rose began tentatively, "that he might... go back to you if I get pregnant?"

"Probably," Lucy said. "I wish he wouldn't, but it's all I'm useful for, isn't it?"

Rose grimaced. "That makes two of us." She sighed. "Part of me wishes I'd just get pregnant straight away, so I'd be rid of him, but I know I'm in the wrong part of my cycle, and then I have to think about the child, and then there's you. I'd be sending him straight back to you."

Lucy stood up. "No. I volunteered for this. You didn't. I'll get him to give you some hormone treatment or something. That's what they do for human pregnancies, it should work for you. He'll know. And then you can get rid of him."

Rose stood up too as Lucy began walking away. "No, that's not fair on you."

"Nor's life," Lucy replied, and she walked out of the door, which locked automatically behind her.

It was a shame that this occasion was the last time Rose Tyler and Lucy Saxon met. Perhaps they would have become great friends. Perhaps they would have forgiven each other. Perhaps there would have been nothing to forgive.


	10. The song of captivity

CH10 The song of captivity

"Your Lord and Master stands on high, playing track 1."

The strains of Mika's 'Grace Kelly' began filtering through the speakers built into the structure of the bridge room as the Master posed in the doorway, silhouetted by the lights from the lift behind him. Francine and Tish Jones looked up, scared for a moment, then quickly resumed their work with a touch more fervour than before. The guards in the room maintained their professional blank faces. The Doctor closed his eyes for a second, but otherwise did not react. The Master swept into the room and began to sing along.

"Do I attract you, do I repulse you with my queasy smile?" he leered at Francine, who moved away under the pretext of polishing the other half of the table. Undeterred, he moved smoothly over to her daughter and pressed himself up against her back. "Am I too dirty, am I too flirty? Do I like what you like?"

Tish, unable to prevent herself, shuddered and the Master pushed her roughly into a chair, which she knocked over.

"Oh go on, pick it up," the Master said. Tish hurried to comply as Francine warred with herself, striving not to go and comfort her daughter.

"I try to be like Grace Kelly," he continued, now wandering casually round the table. "But all her looks were too sad. So I tried a little Freddie." By now he'd reached his destination, directly in front of the Doctor, who was sitting on the mattress that remained in his cage, watching the proceedings with all the weary resignation of a prisoner. "I've gone identity mad!" the Master sang, grinning manically as he prepared for the chorus.

This was the first of many such days when the Master would pick a song and prance around with the assured confidence of a dictator, mocking his captives with the lyrics as he proceeded now to do.

"I could be brown, I could be blue, I could be violet sky! I could be hurtful—" this said with a malicious look thrown directly at the Doctor, who fought not to show how the obscure reference to Rose shook him. "I could be purple, I could be anything you like." He made his way now up the steps in time with the music. "Gotta be green, gotta be mean, gotta be everything more." Now he looked down on them, spread his arms and made a faux-pitiful face. "Why don't you like me? Why don't you like me? Why don't you walk out the door?"

At this point, he laughed. "Cut the music," he ordered, and a soldier flicked one of the switches. "Of course, you can't just _walk out the door_, can you?" he asked rhetorically, as most the occupants of the room were forbidden to speak. "You're stuck here with me!"

The intended joke would not have been funny even to someone on the Master's side; as it was he was alone and no one even attempted a smile.

"Oh, such misery-guts," he grumbled petulantly. "How on earth am I going to spend the rest of your lives with you?" He sighed melodramatically.

No one answered.

"Well, I suppose there are a few perks to being Master of the world," he smiled. With that he leapt down the stairs again and threw himself into a chair to sit opposite the Doctor again. "You know the thing, no one answering back, no pretending to be someone else, no worrying about stupid paperwork and protocols, and then there's the loyal servants, the subjugated human race and the adoring girls just throwing themselves at you."

The fire that ignited in the Doctor's eyes was impossible to prevent.

"Ooh, that bothers you, doesn't it?" the Master crowed. "I wonder why... Maybe it's the way that your girlfriend spent a glorious night screaming my name. Maybe it's the way that you could probably hear that from here, couldn't you? Maybe it's the way that you know it'll be happening all over again for however long I deem necessary... or enjoyable. Maybe you're worried about her being hurt or upset or something equally pathetic, maybe you're worrying about the children she's going to bear me. Or maybe, just maybe..." he trailed off dramatically, leaving the thought open.

"What?" the Doctor snarled flatly.

"Temper, temper," the Master admonished him. "Maybe you're _jealous_."

"What?" the Doctor repeated, incredulously this time.

"Jealous. Adjective meaning resentful or bitter in rivalry against a person because of that person's wealth or successes or _advantages_. Specifically those that said jealous person doesn't have, or hasn't had."

"You think I would be jealous of you because I haven't raped an innocent woman?"

The Master smiled knowingly. "Ah, but would you define what you heard last night as rape? All those glorious moans and cries... I've got the whole thing on tape if you want to survey the evidence," he suggested innocently.

The Doctor was struck speechless.

"And I think what you're jealous of is the feelings that I had last night. Her lips pressed hard against mine, her tongue in my mouth, her skin under my fingers and mine under hers, her body wrapped tight around me, shuddering as she screamed out to heaven..." he trailed off again, seemingly lost in memories of ecstasy.

Somehow, the Doctor regained the power of speech, though his voice was far from steady. "You forced her. You can't expect me to feel—"

"Can't I?" the Master interrupted. "You've never felt that with her, have you? You've never heard her scream out _your _name except in fear or anger. You've never felt her walls tightening around you as you—"

"No!" the Doctor burst out, mainly to cut him off. "Because she never—"

"You don't think she didn't want it? Oh Doctor, how naive are you? She's a human being. No, forget that. She's a living organism. Every single living thing out there has some sort of a sex drive. And she loved you so very much."

Lost as he was in fury, the Doctor didn't fail to note the Master's use of the past tense. _Loved_,not _loves_. He knew it was only a ploy by the Master to erode his confidence in Rose and himself, to torture him just a little, but still it hurt him, still made his hearts clench briefly as the word hit him. He forced himself to calm down then. Arguing with the Master would do no good for anyone.

Their quick retorts descended once more into a simmering silence. The Master was supreme in his smugness, the Doctor cold and controlled once more. When he failed to draw a response, the Master's superior expression slipped, and he sniffed disdainfully before turning away.

"Francine!" he declared. "How good are you at cooking?"

Francine chanced a glance at the Doctor. Strange that she had come to trust him so fast, but he wasn't about to complain. He nodded, signalling that she should just answer him.

"Good," she said shortly, scared of saying more.

"Good what?"

"Good, Master."

"That's better. Right then, you're on kitchen duty. Every day at... what is it... half past two, you're going to bring me something scrummy to eat. Obviously you're late today, but that's okay. I won't be sadistic."

No one dared roll their eyes.

"So chop chop! Off you go to the kitchen. No, wait a minute. On second thoughts, I'll come with you. No better time than the present for getting info on your youngest daughter."

Struck with all the protectiveness and pride of a mother, Francine couldn't help but snap, "I'll never tell you anything about her!"

"Oh really," the Master said dryly. Before Francine had a chance to react, Tish was screaming as the laser screwdriver was turned on her.

"Letitia!" Francine cried, hurrying over to her side. As quickly as it had begun, it ended, and Tish was left panting.

"That wasn't necessary," the Doctor growled.

The Master looked briefly back over his shoulder. "Oh, but it proves a point. Young Letitia is here. Martha isn't. You tell me everything you know about Martha, or Tish gets hurt. After all, you were so eager to tell me before."

"No, Mum," Tish breathed.

"And," the Master continued loudly. "Tish can do the same. You tell me everything about your little sister, where she would go, what she might be planning, or your darling mother gets hurt."

Mother and daughter stared at each other for a moment.

"So!" the Master announced. "Both of you can come to the kitchens. And you can tell me about Martha's friends and family and hidey holes." He strode off towards the door, and both Jones women followed him immediately, Francine supporting Tish, whose breathing was still laboured. The door slid shut behind them, leaving the Doctor essentially alone. No one counted the pair of obligatory guards by the door, least of all the Master.

A small sound escaped the Doctor's lips which might have sounded like a sigh to anyone who did not know him well, but would have brought Rose or Martha running. He was unbelievably... frustrated. There were people here who were being needlessly hurt and he could do _nothing _to help them in any way. Indeed, he was afraid of even speaking up against the Master in case it made matters worse. He was also agonising constantly over Martha. He knew that whatever Tish or Francine told the Master would be of no use, because Martha would be smarter than to go somewhere she had connections to and even he didn't know what route she would take in her journey over the earth, but there was always the distinct possibility that she would be caught, imprisoned, enslaved, or worse, brought back here, and his last hope would be extinguished like a candle in the wind.

And Rose. The Master had a point: even he himself had conceded that whatever had happened last night did not sound like rape. Even he had wondered if Rose had actually enjoyed the experience. Could he have hypnotised her? It was plausible... His subconscious went further, wondering if perhaps she could have fallen for the Master. His conscious mind could not bear the thought.

Unable to remain still a moment longer, he stood up and began pacing round the tiny cell, cursing the lack of energy he could feel in his muscles. Unlike a human, he had no need of muscle stimulants during long periods of inactivity, but the mush he was receiving as nutrition was slowly draining his energy. There wasn't quite the right balance of minerals and nutrients in there; he could sense that his potassium levels were less than satisfactory. There was a reason he was always eating bananas. The cage didn't help; he had an instinctive aversion to being a captive. It was why he had had to escape, all those centuries ago, stealing a TARDIS... He stopped his restless movement, facing away from the room when he heard the door slide open again, and he resisted the urge to sigh. Instead, he sat down again, determined not to let the Master know how badly his sanity was being affected by this.

"Hello?"

This was not a voice he had expected. He wheeled around to see the petite figure of Lucy Saxon standing tentatively nearby, as if she were scared of him.

"Mrs Saxon," he said, and nodded to her. Cold, he knew, but what else would she expect?

She flinched, but she was a lady of breeding, and she controlled herself. "I wanted to talk to you. About Rose."

The last word truly caught his attention, as they both had known it would, and he moved urgently forward, before remembering who this woman was and stopping himself. This could be a ploy of the Master's.

"What about her?" he said guardedly.

Lucy took a seat in the chair that the Master had vacated only minutes ago, perching on the edge of it as though she didn't belong. "I've just been talking to her."

"How is she?" the Doctor burst out before she could continue.

Lucy frowned. It was a difficult question to answer. "She's shaken, and obviously very upset, but she's so strong. She'll be alright."

And there again, tenses drawing his attention. She _will be _alright. So she wasn't alright. So his stupid subconscious had been wrong, thank whatever deity there might be out there; she didn't want the Master. Even as the relief saturated one of his hearts, the other was captivated by rage. She didn't want him, and yet he had forced himself...

Lucy hurried to continue before his expression crossed the line from _angry _to _murderous_. "But I was talking to her about her chances of... falling pregnant."

How horrible it was to not feel surprised at this odd conversation between the companions of two Time Lords. And it was an appropriate verb, he thought, _falling_.

"And whether we could, or he could, really, hurry the process along," Lucy continued, slightly hesitantly. After all, it wasn't every day that you were facing a caged alien who had every right to hate you, advocating the possibility of his girlfriend becoming pregnant by his arch enemy.

"Why?" he asked, in equal parts incredulous, understanding and suspicious. Possibly with a few extra emotions on the side.

"Do you mean why would that be a good idea or why would I think that's a good idea?" Lucy asked, a bit wryly, though she was still clearly nervous.

"A bit of both," the Doctor admitted. "But mainly the second one."

She sighed. "It would be a good idea because I believe he would leave her alone if she became pregnant. Well, he wouldn't demand... Anyway. I know there's the child to think about—she was worrying about that—but it will happen at some point. He'll find a way to make it happen, so I thought it would just be better if we could make it happen quicker. There must be a way; hormones or something similar."

The Doctor nodded. "And the second bit?"

Lucy glanced towards the door.

"He's in the kitchens, trying to get information on Martha out of her family," the Doctor informed her. "I should imagine he'd be a while."

She nodded. "Well then, selfishly, I don't think it's a good idea. I know I married him, but I don't want him, and if he leaves Rose, he will come back to me."

"But here you are, talking to me behind his back," the Doctor observed. "So why?"

Lucy smiled a sad smile. "As I said to Rose, I volunteered for this and she didn't. I made my bed, and now I have to lie in it."

The clichéd analogy was just a little too close to the truth for comfort, but both ignored it.

"Very selfless of you," the Doctor noted.

Again, she sighed, recognising that he, like Rose, was testing her. They really were the perfect pair. "I know you must think I'm some sort of monster," she said. "And you have a perfect right to detest me. But really, you must believe me—I do want to help. Did you know I used to work in charity? All I've ever wanted was to make the world a better place, and he convinced me that was what we would be doing together."

"No, that's not true," the Doctor countered. "You must've wanted him, and you must've wanted the power. Anyone would."

"Maybe," Lucy agreed. "But I did really think that I was doing good. In the long run, at least. Rose explained to me how we shouldn't be changing timelines, and she gave me a mini-lecture on why the murder of one person is as bad as the murder of thousands, but I didn't know any of that before. He took me to the end of the universe, and told me we could change it. All that death and darkness, and we could change it."

The Doctor nodded. "I believe you. It's just a shame _you _believed _him_."

She gave a little hiccough that could have been anything from laughter to a sob and ended up being something in between the two. "I can't do anything about that now."

"No," he agreed. "Thank you for doing this."

She didn't say _my pleasure _because it would have been a lie. She didn't say _you're welcome_ because quite obviously he wasn't. Instead she inclined her head to acknowledge the statement, not quite meeting his eyes.

"I'm sorry," he added. And he was. She was a tragic figure in her pristine pencil skirt and chiffon blouse, black and white. It seemed as if she was finally learning about the shades of grey in life.

"What shall I suggest to him?" she asked, ignoring his sympathy.

It was then that he noticed that she hadn't once mentioned her husband's name—either of them, Harold Saxon or the Master. Perhaps she was suffering a little identity crisis, not wanting to admit that they were the same man, or perhaps she didn't want to think of him at all.

"Don't get specific," he advised her. "Or he'll get suspicious. Just mention that you thought if he wanted this to be quicker, why doesn't he try some sort of hormone treatment."

Lucy nodded. "I should go before he gets back."

She moved to get up but he said "Wait! I meant to ask... how did he... I mean, last night, it sounded..." He cursed himself for struggling with these words, but in all honesty, he never would have expected much better of himself. And she understood.

"He forced himself into her mind," she said quietly. "He controlled her responses. Physical and mental. That's why you heard... what you heard."

A thousand memories and thoughts flew into his mind, and a hundred emotions clenched at his hearts. The horror at such an intrusion, the relief at the explanation as to the lost mental connection, the inevitable anger. He remembered his earlier idea of reopening that connection, and immediately decided that he couldn't contact her like that, not when she would associate it with _him_. He remembered Reinette, Madame de Pompadour, and how she had exploited his own mind while he was searching hers, learning far too much. He remembered how little resistance Reinette had had to the intrusion, _because she trusted him_. It was the same with Rose those few days ago; she had welcomed him. Nothing hidden, nothing to hide, and nothing more than a brush against consciousness, a gentle exchange of thought and expression. Not this brutal possession that the Master had resorted to, and would resort to again.

Lucy stood. "I should really go."

The Doctor brought his gaze back to her and saw his own expression reflected in her eyes. What was more, he saw the glisten of excess moisture there; not enough to be called tears, but enough to betray her own mental agonising. She had been exposed to the same treatment, the _brutal possession_ as the Doctor had termed it, and she had welcomed it. She was disgusted at herself, and seeing the Doctor evaluate the process with such revulsion only reminded her that she would have to go through with it again, now that she would not welcome it at all. Hastily, she rose and walked out of the door, retreating to her room. No, _his_ room.

It was a shame that this was the last time Lucy would speak so freely and honestly to the Doctor. Perhaps she would have learnt from him, perhaps just talking to another person would have saved her. Perhaps it would have saved someone else in a year's time.


	11. Screaming inside their heads

**CH11 Screaming inside their heads**

As the sun began to set behind the orange stained horizon, Rose was sitting on her windowseat, her solemn face lent an eerie glow by the dying light. She didn't know how long it had been since Lucy had left, since she still didn't have a clock or a watch, but she knew that it had been morning then. Since she had been left alone once more, she had been almost stationary, only moving from the window to go to the bathroom or put a plate down for Tish to pick up. She wished the young woman would speak, but appreciated just how much pain the Master could inflict when he wanted to. She supposed that Tish could talk to her mother when they were alone. Rose didn't have that luxury; she couldn't rely on any company other than the Master's. And evening was approaching.

The door opened behind her and her heart gave a frightened twitch. Damn thing; couldn't it try and keep composure? She turned to the door as if she didn't care, quashing the desire to curl into a ball and cry. She was Rose Tyler, dammit.

Tish Jones walked in with a tray of food balanced precariously on one hand and Rose felt her lungs deflate as she let out a sigh of relief.

"Hi, Tish," she said, and smiled a little at her. Then the silent woman walked into the dying light, and Rose's eyes widened in horror. "What's he done to you?"

Tish didn't answer, but Rose hadn't expected that she would. The puffy bruise around her right eye was answer enough. The tear that escaped over the tender flesh was more elaboration than was needed.

Rose leapt up off the windowseat and, taking the tray from her and putting it down on the bed, gathered the woman in a hug. Tish tried to pull away, but Rose said, "Oh come on. You never said he banned physical contact, and this is all my fault. He can blame me."

With that, Tish dissolved into tears that she had been trying to keep in all afternoon as the Master tried to get any information out of her and her mother that would help him locate Martha. Although neither had wanted to betray her, neither could stand seeing the other hurt and every detail about the Jones family had come out. Family friends, extended family, the late Adeola's job in a mysterious government organisation, the house they had used to live in sixteen years ago, Annalise's address, Martha's primary school, the region of France that she'd once visited on a school trip for two days, right down to how she'd hoped to visit Italy one day and see the Coliseum. Tish could only pray that Martha was sensible enough to go anywhere that she _didn't_ have a connection to.

"Shh, shh," Rose said. "It's okay."

Tish could only shake her head. It was anything but okay. She hugged Rose once more and then extricated herself quickly, leaving before she could incriminate herself further, hastily leaving the room. The whole escapade left Rose even more unsettled than before.

She went and picked up the tray. The meal was an ultra-healthy, balanced dish of boiled chicken, boiled potatoes, boiled carrots and boiled peas. Quite frankly, anything was delicious after the mush she'd been forced to eat previously. She could see herself getting seriously bored of it after a while, but right now she was just thankful for every monotonous, inoffensive mouthful. And today, they'd given her gravy. Proper gravy, too, like her mum used to make, not the weak _jus_ that the parallel universe had been crazy about. She and Jackie had both detested the stuff, though Mickey decided he liked it.

_Count your blessings,_ she told herself, and dug in. It wasn't long before she'd scoffed the lot, a habit left over from working for an organisation which didn't care much for how long your lunch hour was. Best to eat as quickly as you could, when you could, what you could, just in case some other race of aliens decided now was the best time to call for a chat, or try to invade. It was worrying really, how many species there were who seemed to think Earth was the perfect conquest, though heartening to think that none of them had been particularly successful. Well, they'd been successful in making Rose lose far more weight than she ever had with the Doctor, but not much else.

Rose placed the now-empty tray on one of the dressing tables for Tish to take away in the morning (seriously, why on earth would she need two dressing tables?) and returned to the windowseat. The sun had now set entirely, leaving only red shadows across the sky, rippling across the water in bloody glints of darkness. Night was setting in. This was how her time passed, noting the time. What else was there to do?

A sharp _click_ from the door made her curse that last thought. _I didn't really want an answer,_ she complained to whoever might be listening. No one paid attention, and the Master walked through the door, dressed once again in a silk dressing gown. Tonight, though, he had forgone the pyjamas.

She stood self-consciously. Why, she wasn't quite sure. Part of it was the desire to have the upper ground, part of it was a last-ditch attempt to give herself a little more confidence, part of it was the insane notion that one did not sit while the Master was standing.

"Ah! Rose!" he said. "My darling little mother, how are you tonight?"

"Fine," she replied. It was a lie, but honestly, who cared?

"Good, good," he muttered absently, wandering around as if he owned the place. Well, he did. "Enjoy your meal?" he asked as he saw the empty plate.

Some combination of learned scepticism, intuitive paranoia and the way he asked the seemingly innocent question helped Rose to piece the evidence together.

"You drugged me," she stated.

He looked up at her, raised his eyebrows. "Of course I did."

"With what?"

He pouted. "Oh, and I thought you were getting clever."

"_With what_?"

"Now, now, let's not get rebellious," he chided her. "It was only a bit of hormones, anyway. Almost all of them human, believe it or not. I know, ridiculous, isn't it, using human hormones in a situation like this... But anyway, hormones. Specifically fertility hormones."

Rose didn't know what to feel. Relief that it was nothing more? Relief that if they worked, this might be over soon? Gratitude to Lucy, or even to him? Horror that she could soon be pregnant? Fear for what was about to follow?

"How soon will that work?" she asked, and was pleasantly surprised to discover that her voice was entirely even.

"Tonight. It's not like your human remedies, all about chance and maybes," he said scathingly. "One dose, one lot of sperm, one child."

"Not twins?" she asked. "Aren't they supposed to be more common with fertility treatment?"

"Don't be stupid," he said. "Twins are a waste of resources."

Nothing else he could have said would have reinforced more what she was doing. The way he casually dismissed a pair of innocent, if abstract, children as a waste of resources, told her exactly what she was unwillingly inflicting on some unconceived child, _her _child. An image of Jackie suddenly filled her mind, holding Tony in the hospital after his birth, flushed and sweaty and beaming at the little pink-faced bundle in her arms while Rose looked on. Then another image, the last Christmas before their forced move to another universe, when the Doctor was in a post-regenerative coma and Rose was sobbing over her apparent loss, and though Jackie could easily have claimed to hate the alien in her flat, she held Rose close and just let her cry.

_This_ was not motherhood.

"Well then!" the Master said. "Shall we get started? Ooh, no, wrong sentiment to that. That made it sound like you have a choice. Let me rephrase: let's get started. Yes, that's much better."

It was the second time. Rose knew exactly what was going to happen. She had had all day to come to terms with that. And she was even more scared than yesterday, even more angry, even more distraught, even less human. And she couldn't help the tiny step backwards that she took.

And he couldn't help seeing it.

"Oh for goodness' sake!" he exclaimed. "I thought we got past that last night. Why can't you just do what I say! Why can't you just be a stupid, normal, docile human like all the rest of them!"

Rose was terrified. She had seen him as a predator, as a schemer, as a maniac; she had seen him as delirious, as malicious, as domineering. She had not seen him as angry, and she was terrified.

"I am your Master!" he shouted, moving towards her hastily, urgently, angrily. "You will do as I say!"

Her ragged breathing and her tear-glazed eyes were enough to make him pull back his hand and slap her.

She was sent sprawling to the floor, reeling from the force of the blow. Instinctively she curled into a ball, trying to protect herself.

"Stand up!" he ordered her. "Stand up!"

But she couldn't, and she wouldn't, and to her shame, the tears were beginning to stain her cheeks already.

He grabbed her shoulders and pulled her up easily, with next to no effort. _Superior Time Lord physiology_. She had heard the words so many times with a cheerful wink and a smug smile, but they echoed through her mind now in her own voice, small and scared, and now she was standing, facing him.

"Get on the bed," he ordered her next.

"Why don't you make me?" she asked, her fear coming out as anger, as it often did. "Get inside my head and make me."

He sneered. "Because it's not half as fun."

The full horror of what was about to occur hit her like a wrecking-ball. No, she wouldn't have to deal with the guilt tomorrow of having enjoyed it, but tonight she would have to be raped. By anyone's definition. Even his.

"So get on the bed," he leered.

What could she do? She backed away, instinctively keeping her predator in front of her, and sat stiffly on the bed.

"Better," he smirked. "Now take off your top."

The item in question was a long sleeved t-shirt, pale lilac cotton, and as she pulled it over her head Rose hated the brief moments in which he was out of her sight. She sucked her stomach in so as to present a smaller target and as a mark of self-consciousness. She knew, of course, that it was ridiculous to feel self-conscious in front of this man, but it was a trait that any Earth girl would have in abundance and not one that could be ignored.

"Oh, I like this," the Master said, and just like that he was back to the suave, self-assured, cheerful Master that Rose had seen. "Jeans?"

Rose stood, hating that this movement brought her closer to him again, and unfastened her jeans with trembling fingers. There was something completely disarming about undressing herself, the strange mixture of control and helplessness clashing violently in her heart. Her skin, as it was bared, froze into goose bumps despite the heating that was at the perfect level for a human being.

"For goodness' sakes, take off your socks," the Master complained next. "You look ridiculous."

And so she complied, discarding all the garments in a pathetic little heap by her feet. She felt awkward, overbalancing as she pulled first one, then the other sock off, but she decided against sitting down. She couldn't stop him looking down at her, but she could minimise the distance, a tiny thing that might help her.

"And stop there," he said, as though he was watching her audition for a play. What role would this be, she wondered. "My go."

She looked down as soon as his hands moved to the belt of his robe, fixing her gaze on her own toes.

"Look at me."

It was something to be said for him that the mere sound of his voice made her obey. Still, she focused her eyes on his, never looking elsewhere.

"And I'll do the honours, I think."

His body was pressed against hers forcefully as he undid her bra with ease. The thin layer of lace and satin remained between them, so tight were they pressed together. Rose expected him to move onto her knickers next; it was the logical thing to do.

He pushed her with surprising strength onto the bed, making her head snap forwards with the force, and knelt over her, his hands on her shoulders stopping her from moving.

* * *

Four or five metres away, through a flimsy partition wall, the Doctor pressed his hands over his ears to block out the sounds of her pain.


	12. Not what I call natural parenting

**CH12 Not what I call natural parenting**

When Rose woke up in the morning, her first thought was of pain. Everywhere hurt; she was sure her entire body would be littered with bruises if she cared to look. The worst injuries seemed to be to her head, as well as the sharp stabbing sensation between her legs.

The Master was not there. He had left as soon as he was spent, not bothered enough to wait for her to stop crying. Not that she'd exactly been sobbing, but the tears just wouldn't stop flowing. Rose vaguely remembered him slapping her hard across the face before he left; that would be the reason for her throbbing head, then.

Groaning, she pulled herself up into a sitting position, cradling her head in her hands, her elbows resting on her knees. She stayed like that only for half a minute, not thinking of anything in particular, just acclimatising to being awake and to being in pain. After that moment of recollection, she flung back the bedsheets and walked briskly over to the bathroom, trying to keep her mind as blank as it could be. She didn't bother feeling self-conscious about the camera that twisted mechanically to follow her movement.

Once in the shower, which was again set to a temperature akin to that of lava, she began to cry. And cry. And cry.

* * *

Come the morning, the Doctor was every bit as shaken as he had been through the night. Time did not dull the horror that persisted, rather making it worse as he was given time to peruse the memory at his own leisure, matching each cry to a possible injury, seeing the bruises blossom, watching her face contorted and...

"Stop it."

He whispered the words fiercely to himself, knowing that they would do no good. He could no more stop worrying about Rose than he could stop thinking at all.

But life decided, as it always does, that it would not stop for him, nor for her, and Tish came in with his breakfast looking exactly as she had done the previous evening. Physically bruised and mentally broken. She didn't react to his evident distress, and it was a rare person who could ignore such raging emotion when presented in the Doctor's eyes.

"Hi, Tish," he said softly.

As always, she ignored him and placed the tin bowl of mush on the floor, pushing it between the bars. Then she retreated, preparing to deliver the morning meal to whoever else she was charged to serve. Lucy, the Master, Rose. Jack? Were they bothering to feed him, knowing that he would never die of starvation?

But as Tish went to open the doors, someone got there first. Her eyes widening in terror, she stepped back and to the side, out of the way of the Master who now strode in, impeccably dressed in his dinner suit. Thankfully, he ignored the young girl, intent only on informing the Doctor of the latest developments. He flung himself into a chair, spun round and leant forward, his hands on his knees and his face almost pressed against the bars.

"Guess what?"

There was no way that the Doctor was going to reply. So the Master pressed on.

"We're having a baby!"

One of the many limitations of the English language is that when one uses the plural pronoun 'we', it is unclear to whom the user is referring. Are they talking about themselves and the person they are talking to? Or themselves and other, unknown parties? Or themselves, the person they are talking to and other, unknown parties?

Does it ever really matter?

When the Doctor didn't voice any of the myriad thoughts racing through his mind, the Master felt it necessary to clarify: "Rose is pregnant."

He couldn't deal with this right now, so he chose not to. His mind switched to a more mechanical, more military way of functioning.

"Already?" he asked, covering his part in getting him to administer fertility treatment.

"Oh yes. Well. Not quite yet, but she will be. In about a week's time. Of course, that's if you take the definition of pregnancy as beginning at implantation." Suddenly the Master leant back and put his hands behind his head, the picture of ease. "But you know, that's all so technical. I may as well just say she's pregnant now."

"Mm," the Doctor said shortly. "Normal pregnancy?"

"No idea," the Master said happily. "What's normal, anyway? This is a first! An event in the history of the universe!"

"Are you going to intervene in any way?" the Doctor asked, ignoring his old friend's crowing.

He twisted his lips into a thoughtful moue. "I don't think so," he decided. "I'd rather see how it happens. It could be interesting."

It sounded as though he were talking of a scientific experiment. Perhaps, to him, it was.

To Rose, one of the most human of humans, it would be anything but.

"Can I see her?" the Doctor asked.

As soon as he'd asked the question, he regretted it. Who knew what way the Master's mind would twist the request? And how pitiful did he sound, asking permission? And surely the answer would be no anyway, so what was the point?

Surprisingly though, the answer was not quite as instantaneous as the Doctor had expected. Instead the Master grinned, the grin that showed he was plotting something, the grin that made the Doctor's hearts sink.

"Oh, you'll see her," he said. "In fact, you'll see her in a few hours time. Shall we say midday?"

* * *

Pregnant.

The word echoed around Rose's head in a maelstrom of voices, whispering and shouting and weaving together to make a discordant symphony of nightmares.

Like most young girls, Rose had assumed that one day she would have a child. It had just been one of the facts of her future: job, partner, kids. When she was fourteen or so she used to spend hours chatting with Shareen and Kate and all the others, and together they had picked out baby names and decided how many kids they would have, and what colour their rooms would be, and what books they'd read to them, and how they'd dress them up. They all had an image in their heads, the setting flexible, though Kate had vowed she was going to marry a millionaire and would end up in a manor house, but the general picture the same: a glowing dream of a perfect family. They had all scoffed at Bex from down the other end of the estate, who was determined not to bring a child into this world, because the politicians were ruining it and no kid from a council estate had any hope of anything anymore.

Rose wondered if Bex was still alive.

This reality of pregnancy was about as far as it could possibly be from her childish dreams of people congratulating her as she walked the streets and picking out stuff for her unborn child, and everything smelling of flowers. And Bex was right: she could not justify bringing a child into this world. Even if it was the continuation of a dying species. Especially if it was the continuation of a dying species; what sort of a future would the Time Lords have if they were all descendants of the Master? She thought with bitter regret of memories of deciding a girl would be Anna and a boy would be Sam. It was all so down to earth and idealistic.

There was a thought: names. No parent in their right mind picked 'the Master' or 'the Doctor' as a name. So how did Time Lords get their names? Did they pick them? Or was there some kind of rite that revealed it or something?

Her baby would have a human name too, she decided.

Currently she was curled up in her favourite spot on the windowseat, staring out at the sea far below her. She couldn't find the energy to lift her head and watch the sky, despite the high-energy breakfast of porridge with bananas that Tish had left on a dressing table whilst she was showering. She was still lacking a clock, but guessed it must be some time around eight or nine in the morning, which meant she had successfully passed about two hours without thinking of her own status at all. Sure, she had already thought about her child (she was trying to forget it was not solely hers) in terms of names and whether she would be allowed to take care of it (she thought not) but she hadn't really thought of the bit that came first. Until the baby was born, where did that leave her?

Rose fervently hoped that Lucy was right and the Master would leave her alone now. But even if he did abstain from using her body from now on, surely she'd still have to put up with his presence for checkups and scans and the occasional gloating visit. After all, gloating seemed to be his main pastime now that he didn't have to fill the hours by plotting to take over the world. Perhaps he'd consent to let Lucy visit every now and again. Other than that, Rose guessed she would spend the next nine months (or whatever) just being supremely bored. Perhaps she could use her position as mother of the Gallifreyan race to wangle some books or something?

Just as she was considering this, she became aware of a noise in the corner of the room, where the wall against which the headboard of the bed was pressed and the wall opposite the window met. It sounded as though someone—or something—was trying to get in.

She'd forgotten: she was Rose Tyler. Boredom didn't happen to her.

Jumping up, she cast about for something, anything that might be of use to her, but of course there was nothing. She didn't even have the luxury of a razor to shave under her arms. Then again, maybe it was better that she didn't have anything pertaining to a weapon; God only knew how the Master would punish her if it were him trying to get into her room right now. But that was ridiculous? Why wouldn't he just use the door?

Someone else, then. Could it be Jack? Had he escaped from wherever he was being held? Hadn't he always said there was no prison in the galaxy that he hadn't escaped from?

She didn't dare consider the possibility that it might be the Doctor.

She wished she knew where her room was actually located in the ship. She knew that Lucy's room was next door, but it was on the opposite side to where the noise was coming from, behind her wardrobe and bathroom. The door was opposite the window, so presumably that was a corridor, and it was kind of obvious what was outside the window, but she had no idea what other room hers bordered on.

Suddenly, the wall fell away.

Rose jumped back, though it had not fallen towards her but into the room on the other side, and it was not the entire wall but a section about four feet across. She wasn't quite sure whether she was eager or scared to see who it was who was destroying the furniture, but she was surprised. A team of guards were systematically removing the piece of wall, which she saw now was incredibly thin and flimsy, and were preparing to move on to the next section.

"What's going on?" she asked.

An anonymous man in his black uniform looked up, shrugged and said, "Master's orders."

"Yeah, I guessed that," she said dryly, but didn't ask any more. Evidently these men didn't know any more than she did. Except they did, because they knew where they were.

Standing on tiptoes, she tried to work out what room she was now looking into. From here she couldn't see a grand amount; there wasn't much light besides that which spilled in from a door she could see parallel with her own. Really, she was looking at another wall, about a couple of yards back from where hers used to be. Storage?

In a sense, she was right.

The guards moved into her room and a couple moved the bed a few feet into her room to let them get at the wall. Apparently something was blocking them on the other side. Something which was heavier than her bed.

Such as a cage.

"Doctor!"

He couldn't resist a smile. "Hello again, Rose."


	13. Hello again

CH13 Hello again

It transpired that Rose's room backed directly onto the small, dark antechamber in which was stored the Doctor's—formerly her—cage. Just beyond that, the wooden panelling had been removed so she had a clear view into the main control room of the Valiant. She couldn't, however, move into it as her wall had been replaced with a Perspex facsimile, perforated with holes to allow the passage of sound if nothing else.

Unfortunately, there was no chance for a reunion, as the Master was already in the room and ready to spoil the moment.

"Don't say I'm not a man of my word, Doctor," he scolded him. "Didn't I say you'd see her again?"

And Rose had to admit that she did feel sort of grateful for this. It didn't outweigh all the horrors he'd bestowed on her before, of course it didn't, but it was still a huge relief. Lucy was nice, well, as nice as you could get for marrying a madman, and she reckoned they could be friends eventually, but she wasn't likely to know a great deal about what was going on in her body, and she just wasn't the Doctor.

So, "Thanks," she said to the Master.

He looked rather taken aback, but the Doctor was smiling. Quickly, he recovered.

"My pleasure," he simpered. "Much more convenient, like this. I can keep an eye on you at the same time as looking after him."

Neither the Doctor nor Rose missed the way that he was now addressing solely Rose, who was reminded of Jackie's lectures on being polite: "Manners do wonders sometimes, young lady, so you just go and say thank you before I lose all mine, go on." The Doctor knew better that it was more a case of flattery. Rose had played up to his ego by making him look like a beneficiary and he was responding to that. Carefully, he stored that in his mental arsenal, hoping its effects wouldn't be completely negated if he used it, rather than the far more innocent Rose. If he could call her innocent anymore.

In the meantime, Rose had pressed her little finger through one of the holes, and the Doctor reached through the bars of his cage, and they touched. It wasn't quite holding hands, but it would do for now. Rose almost visibly relaxed as they made contact, as though it erased the last humanoid contact she had undergone.

That day, though by the time the work was completed there was little left of it, they spent in near silence. The Master was there the whole time, evidently hoping to catch a private conversation, and Rose didn't particularly want to talk, anyway. She just wanted to know that the Doctor was there, and that they'd be able to talk in the future. Still, she spent the afternoon lying on her bed, her face close to the glass wall. She took her evening meal apologetically, and he turned away to force his obligatory chemical mash down his throat. She moved the pillows to the side of the bed so she could fall asleep with her eyes on him. He smiled as she stubbornly blocked out the last time she had used that bed.

And so began their lives. It wasn't anything that they were used to, despite all the thousands of times they'd been in captivity before. Rose had never been held in such luxurious yet harrowing captivity, and the Doctor had never spent this long in such a small space without breaking out somehow. That went for both of them, actually, and somehow being imprisoned had never felt quite so real.

For example, the Doctor had never been locked up quite so long that the absence of a toilet had been a problem. Several days in, however, and it was impossible to abstain any more, despite his oft-boasted of superior Time Lord biology. The so-called food he'd been eating helped too, as there was very little waste product: just a little fibre which would have been essential for human digestion and was a tad superfluous for him. He was careful to regulate his fluid intake, as well, to minimise the amount of urine he produced without getting dehydrated.

However, every schoolchild knows that every living creature has seven life processes: movement, respiration, sensitivity, growth, nutrition, reproduction and excretion. As the Doctor reflected, humans hadn't been all that far off on this little theory. There were a few exceptions of course, but sadly, they didn't include Time Lords.

Rose, he knew, had had the same problem. She, however, had used the water bowl, which had been removed at the same time as Rose herself.

The first time he urinated from inside the cage was the night after the walls had been removed. Rose was fast asleep and dreaming, sprawled out on her disproportionate bed with her head buried in the pillow. She used to sleep like that in the TARDIS, and the Doctor had always feared that she would suffocate herself accidentally. Of course, he knew that if she did cut off her airways, she would wake up because of her body's natural instincts, and therefore she'd be in minimal danger, but he wasn't particularly rational when it came to her. He'd proved that many a time.

Anyway, Rose wasn't about to see anything, but there were cameras everywhere. He knew that. He also knew beyond doubt that they would be equipped with night vision. Furthermore, he knew that they were fitted with motion sensors, so they would be focused right on him. Therefore, he couldn't escape them watching him. And he really, _really_, had to go.

That first time, nothing happened. Rose didn't wake up, the Master didn't walk in, there were no guards on duty, and the Doctor breathed a sigh of relief.

The next day, however, was far from comfortable.

The Master breezed in sometime just after dawn, this time without the musical fanfare, and abruptly stopped to sniff.

"Ew. Oh, just... ew. What on earth is that smell?" The last was voiced in an exceedingly sarcastic manner.

The Doctor closed his eyes briefly, but didn't respond.

Rose stirred on the other side of the wall, disturbed by the Master's voice. She let out a little moan at being awoken so ridiculously early and took a couple of seconds to even open her eyes.

"Ah! Rose!" the Master said, forbidding any prospect of returning to sleep. "Can you smell that?"

"What?" she asked blearily.

"That. Go on, take a good sniff. Disgusting, isn't it?"

Rose Tyler was not a morning person. Her brain wasn't fully in gear after such a relaxing night's sleep. So she didn't think much of the implications of the question before sniffing obediently and wrinkling her nose in a grimace. "Ugh."

"My sentiments exactly!" the Master exclaimed. "Ugh indeed. Now what do you think that smells like?"

Rose sat up, opened her mouth to answer, and then snapped it shut again, paling as she realised what she had been about to say.

The Doctor looked determinedly down.

The Master looked from one to the other, realising that he wasn't going to get anymore out of them. "Well, someone's going to have to clean that up now, aren't they? But oh no..." He sighed dramatically. "I have work to do. It's rather busy, being Master of the world. A lot of coordinating. One of you will have to ask Mrs Francine Jones to clear that up."

He grinned. "Now, I must go and coordinate. I can hardly concentrate with that stench."

The Doctor didn't look up as the Master left the room, pinching his nose theatrically. Rose gently moved up closer to her glass wall, but the Doctor didn't look up.

"Sorry," she said softly.

"No. There's nothing to be sorry about," he said stiffly. "Don't."

"Don't what?" she countered. "Doctor—"

"Rose."

Just like that, the conversation was over. She wished he wasn't quite so gifted at doing that. Sighing, she got up and went to take a shower and get dressed. Perhaps it was a little tactless to go to her bathroom at a time like this, but what choice did she have?

More choice than the Doctor, at least.

While Rose was in the shower, Francine and Tish came in to do their early morning jobs. Neither noticed the smell, at least not at first. But then Tish grimaced and touched her mother's arm. She didn't speak, still scared of the repercussions even when the Master was not there, but she gestured to her nose and Francine frowned in turn.

"Sorry," the Doctor said, attempting to infuse some lightness into his voice. "Over here." He waved a hand at the side of the cage, and they saw the stain on the floor. "The Master told me to ask you to clean it up. Sorry," he said again.

Tish looked faintly disgusted, but Francine was now looking solely at the Doctor, rather than at the mess. Until this moment, she had never stopped blaming him for this whole sticky situation. If Martha had never met this man, then Saxon would never have targeted her, and she... What? Would it be better to be down there with the rest of the human race? She didn't know as yet exactly what was happening on Earth, but she had heard various orders being given for the building of labour camps, for the eradication of the old and useless, for the enslavement of all those who could work.

Suddenly, she didn't blame the Doctor anymore. She saw him for the first time as a caged victim, reduced to pissing between bars and trying to apologise for it. She thought back to the first time she had met him, how he had allegedly saved them all and she had slapped him for it.

She stepped towards the Doctor's cage and held out a hand to him. He looked confused for a minute, but then he understood and took it.

"Thank you," he said. "I'm sorry this ever happened to you. And it's not your fault."

She didn't speak, but smiled ever so slightly and turned to get her cleaning materials. Tish went to help, but Francine waved her off. Tish had nothing to prove, and Francine was damned if she was going to let her daughter clean up urine.

For his part, the Doctor felt a little less ashamed. Perhaps he'd lost a lot of his dignity from regeneration to regeneration, but this had felt particularly acute. Francine, in her motherly way, had helped immeasurably, and when Rose came back out, freshly dressed and engaged in brushing her hair, he was able to greet her with a smile.

By this time Tish had delivered both their morning meals: mush for him and muesli for her. Normally, Rose would have complained about muesli, but she didn't think she had much right at the moment. She did however ignore it for a minute under the pretext of needing her hands for her hair as she sat on the edge of her bed.

"You alright?" she asked, casually enough that he could dismiss the question if he so wished.

"Yeah," he said. "I've just changed my mind about the mothers."

She raised her eyebrows, teasing out a persistent knot.

"But don't tell Jackie," he added hurriedly.

Bless Rose, she tried to smile. He saw that. He saw her lips twitch up and her eyelids blink, but he also saw the water welling up and her throat clench. He saw her try to carry on brushing her hair with shaking hands, and he saw her give up on that stubborn tangled lock and drop the implement onto the silk sheets. He saw the tears fall, tumble, cascade onto those white sheets. He saw her try to mutter "sorry".

She tried, anyway. At least she tried. And he thought Jackie would have been proud of her, if she'd ever had the chance to see her again.


	14. The Children of Time

**CH14 The Children of Time**

"Sir!"

"How many times! I'm not 'sir', you blithering alien, I'm the Master!"

The time was mid-morning, the place was what the Master liked to call his coordination centre, or what everyone else referred to as his office. He had never been one for bureaucracy.

The room was a testament to how much work the Master actually did. Every wall was covered in paper and notes, mostly in Gallifreyan, but with the odd English word here and there, usually names. Of these, 'Jones', 'Martha' and 'Torchwood' were by far the most prevalent. Diagrams littered boards and desks and tables, and no less than five computers with three monitors each were in constant operation. The floor was meticulously clear, so as to let the Master quickly access whatever it was he wanted to access, and it was this that turned the chaos into organised chaos. Evidently, the Master had his own way of remembering where and when everything was. He had no need, for example, of filing cabinets. No, every pile of notes and reports and maps and blueprints was coordinated in a different way, a subjunctive way that could not be kept in check with a stupid, human cabinet for files. And such an unimaginative name!

At present, the Master was engaged in plans concerning Russia. Shipyard number one, he had designated it. Lots of potential, with all that unused space, though the temperature would be something to think about; he couldn't have his slaves at less than maximum efficiency.

As such, he was understandably annoyed to be interrupted, especially by some idiotic human who couldn't even get his title right.

"Sorry. Master, we have new reports."

The Master sighed, not looking up from his map. "If you don't stop bothering me, you'll have new reporting duties, aka to the Toclafane at target practice. Now go away."

"Sorry, Master, but they concern Martha Jones."

Suddenly his head snapped up and he was directly in front of the soldier. "Why didn't you tell me?" he crowed gleefully. "You're promoted. No, hang on, what rank are you? Oh I don't care, you're promoted. Brilliant! Now tell me where she is."

The private—now Lance Corporal—smiled in return. "A patrol group caught sight of her in the northern area of Greater London."

"How did they get past the perception filter?" the Master demanded, still grinning.

"Her jewellery was reflective. It caught the attention of an officer."

The Master's eyes widened. "Magnificent. Then what?"

The Lance Corporal shifted, resisting the urge to step back. "She got away. But—"

"You're demoted again," the Master cut in. "Continue."

"We're not sure where she went, but we do know now her general whereabouts. Patrols are spreading out over the area she was found in with dogs to track her scent."

The Master turned away, thinking for a second. Abruptly, he whipped his head back around. "Did she know that you knew about the jewellery?"

This was why a private had been sent in. A private was the lowest in the pecking order; they had to do what they were told. This particular private was now quaking in his boots as he answered, "Yes, Master."

"No!"

The Master's face was a true portrayal of anger and frustration. Nothing could have defined those words quite so clearly as his expression. He slammed both fists on a table, and a sheaf of paper fell to the floor. "You're demoted again. Double demoted. Triple demoted. Get out!"

The man, who was now not sure if he were even a soldier, scrambled to comply, but the Master suddenly gained composure and held up a hand. "Stop."

He could do nothing but obey.

The Master straightened up, slowly, menacingly. "You were a private when you came into this room. I promoted you to the rank of a Lance Corporal. Then I demoted you to being a private. Then to a civilian. And then I demoted you again."

His wretched victim quivered where he stood.

The Master pulled the laser screwdriver from the pocket of his flawless tuxedo and killed him. Then he surveyed his coordination centre.

"Damn. Now I need to get this body cleared out. Oh, and my papers are all disorganised!"

He ignored the mess and sat back down in front of his map. "Shoot the messenger," he muttered. "Always shoot the messenger."

* * *

In the meantime, Rose had calmed down. "Sorry," she said for the umpteenth time.

"Don't be," the Doctor replied for the umpteenth time.

"I'll stop being such an emotional wreck sometime soon," she vowed. "I'm annoying myself."

"How rude would it be for me to say that you're not the only person that you're annoying?" he asked innocently.

"Very."

"Shame."

"And anyway, I'll just claim hormones."

"I seem to remember that you got away with that often enough before."

"Oi! You have no idea how much I want to slap you for that."

"And now I know it's hormones."

She had to laugh. "I suppose Time Lords don't have hormones?"

"Of course we do," he protested. "Just rather more controllable ones."

"Same difference," she shrugged.

"Oxymoron."

She blinked. "Excuse me?"

"Oxymoron. Two words put together that totally contradict each other. For example, ooh, bittersweet, friendly fire, pretty ugly..."

"Same difference."

"Exactly!"

Suddenly, Rose burst out laughing.

"What?" the Doctor asked.

"I was crying two minutes ago," she said between giggles. "And now you're teaching me about random functions of the English language."

He raised an eyebrow. "You haven't got me started on tautology yet."

She shook her head. "I'm not even going to ask what that is. You'll just make me sound like some stupid idiot."

It was his turn now to burst out laughing.

"What?" Rose asked, but he shook his head.

"If I told you it wouldn't be half as funny."

She glared at him for half a second, then gave up and grinned. "It's nice to see you smile."

"Likewise," he assured her. "Fancy doing it again sometime?"

"That would be lovely."

"It's a date. Well. Ish."

* * *

This just totally sucked.

Captain Jack Harkness was really feeling the ache in his shoulders. His hands were drained of all blood, and he wondered if his fingers might eventually fall off, and if they did, would they grow back if he died again?

Suicide had rarely seemed so appealing.

Jack had made a fatal mistake when being taken down to... wherever he was. Somewhere in the bowels of the Valiant, out of sight and out of mind. Yeah, he'd been a bit of an idiot and tried to escape. He was kind of thinking that if he could just get Rose and the Doctor out (not that he was entirely sure how) they might be able to actually do something. He had no idea what Martha was doing on the Earth below, no idea if anyone actually had a plan in this bloody nightmare. So, being Jack Harkness, escapee of every prison in three galaxies, he tried to get away. He bloody well succeeded, too.

For all of three metres.

He should write a book on how to identify each type of manmade bullet one day.

When he woke up, someone had taken the executive decision to chain him up by his wrists. It was one of the less comfortable positions he had been chained in, though he had to be grateful that he was actually able to reach the floor. Hanging like this would have been agony.

Not that this wasn't.

He'd lost track of time a while ago (though he couldn't say how long ago, of course), but he thought it might have been four days. Only four days. Most of that time he'd spent just standing there, thinking. He thought about the wretchedness of his situation until he realised that that really wasn't doing anything for his sanity and he so did not want to spend eternity being insane, and then his thoughts turned to the people on good old planet Earth below.

First, Martha. Where was she, what was she doing? Surely she hadn't been captured, or he might have heard something. Maybe. He knew that the Doctor had spoken to her before she left—what had he told her? He seriously wished he knew what the hell was going on.

Next, his team. Gwen, Tosh, Owen and Ianto. The last he'd heard, they'd been sent off on a wild goose chase to the Himalayas, and he wondered if they'd been ordered to go, and if so, who on earth they'd decided had the authority to order them. Or had the Master created some odd radiation and hoped Tosh's computer skills would be good enough to pick it up, but not good enough to realise that it was a trap?

What had happened to them in the Himalayas?

Jack had seen enough worlds conquered to know that generally, the conqueror takes advantage of the conquered to work for them. This would seem a pretty obvious thing for the Master to do; he'd got the impression from the Doctor that he wouldn't stop at Sol 3. He reckoned, therefore, that the population of Earth would be enslaved and put to good use as a workforce, in order to create war machines. Bombs, rockets, rocket bombs, that sort of thing. The population that couldn't work, the elderly and disabled in particular, he guessed would be eliminated. Thankfully, that didn't include his team.

The problem was that they belonged to another subsection: the intelligentsia. Those with the know-how to possibly begin fighting back. UNIT and Torchwood, Military Intelligence, the FBI: they would be the main worries. And then there was that Japanese group, Han Gaikokujin, who had bases on all five islands of Japan. They'd need to watch out. Because it didn't take a genius to work out what would happen to them.

Logically, Jack knew that Torchwood 3 stood no chance. They were the group that the Master had targeted first, knowing that Jack would try to contact them as soon as he returned (how in hell had he found out about them? Had Owen been ordering pizza in his name again?) and they were the group of which he knew every member's whereabouts.

There were two possibilities of Torchwood 3's fate. First, and most hopefully, they hadn't protested. When whoever it was came to take them prisoner, they hadn't fought back and so they'd been left to rot in a jail somewhere, much like him. They might have been forced to work for the Master, but he hoped that wasn't so. Earth hadn't a prayer against his team and the Master combined. The second option was by far the more likely. Either the Toclafane had got them straight away, or they'd fought back and been shot.

There was probably an eighty five percent chance that they were all dead.

For the first time, Jack regretted hiring them, all of them. Toshiko could have decomposed safely and slowly in a UNIT holding facility, and she would never have been killed. Hell, she might even have been let free now, set to work. The Master would see her potential just as Jack had; he'd set her up high. Owen would have been an ordinary doctor still, helping the people of Earth. That would put the two of them on opposing sides, but wouldn't that be better than being dead together? Gwen would... well, it depended what the Master was doing with the police force. Either he would wipe them out, or he would set them to work along with everyone else. Ianto would...

Where would Ianto be?

Alive. That would be the main thing. Jack had had many lovers over the years, and he wasn't about to claim that Ianto was more important than any of them, because that wasn't true. He wouldn't even claim that they were all equally important to him. He would, however, say that Ianto had meant a great deal to him. Nah, that sounded so bland and unfeeling. He loved Ianto, of course he did. And Ianto loved him, too. And what more was there to say than that?

Jack leant backwards and, with a loud and satisfying _crack_, straightened out his spine.

* * *

_A/N: The reason I'm posting this now is threefold. Firstly, that felt like a summary chapter, or else a little teaser of things to come. Secondly, Lucy Saxon née Cole is returning at Christmas so I'm getting my version out there before then. Thirdly, I'm giving any readers a chance to influence what happens next. Review or PM me with your suggestions. Fourthly (okay, so I lied), I want you to tell me if this is a rubbish story that should be scrapped now before it gets even worse. And fifthly (yeah, I really lied), I wanted to post it._


	15. Some sort of undercity

**CH15 Some Sort of Under-City**

A day in the life of Tish Jones. Quite frankly, it was crap. Up at the dawn, get up from a crappy little camp bed in the bowels of the ship, air carrier, whatever it was, no shower, just the sink in the semi-privacy of a loo with a camera in the room, and then rush off to the main rooms to get them dusted and generally spruced up before the Master came in. Sometimes he beat her (and her mum) to it, usually after a night where he had obviously not bothered to sleep and instead had spent hours watching cameras. It wasn't hard to tell. There was that time when her mum had been crying in her bed all night and before the sun had even flipping risen, he was in their little cell, pretending to be sympathetic and telling her not to worry, her other daughter would be here soon.

They'd all still been in their nightclothes, which were really just their underwear since nightwear was apparently a luxury not afforded to them, and he'd just come barging in. Needless to say, they'd been seriously unnerved. They all knew what he'd been doing with Rose.

Anyway.

As soon as her and her mum had got the place tidy and clean, or enough that he wouldn't complain about it, it was off to the kitchens to get breakfast. Not for herself. For the Master, for the Doctor, and for Rose. To be fair, once Rose had got wind of that she'd started leaving half hers for Tish, and the kitchen staff occasionally left the Joneses some food, but apparently the Master had decided that breakfast wasn't necessary either for the family of a political terrorist.

Had she mentioned that that was Martha's new title? Political terrorist. Yeah, and Tish was a nuclear physicist.

So she served Rose and the Doctor's breakfast just as soon as she'd done the cleaning, which was generally only an hour or so after sunrise—Rose's schedule was dictated by the daylight and the Doctor's by Rose—and then the Master's half an hour later. That was his idea of a lie in, it seemed. His idea of luxury. On a good day, he wouldn't take any notice of her. Though generally these days were the ones where he had been distracted by something else, such as news of Martha or reports that his plans for Russia were taking a little longer to be realised than had previously been thought, and then the good day would quickly turn sour. On a bad day, he would be in a good mood and up to taunting and teasing and flirting and gloating. That was unbearable.

She still had to bear it, of course. She had no choice.

After breakfast, it was back to cleaning, and a more thorough job of it this time. Everything had to be scoured and polished to perfection. There was actually a team that was supposed to do this with them, but the Master had made it quite plain that they were to stay 'downstairs', out of the public eye with the various guards and kitchen staff and technicians and everyone else who was also necessary for the running of this place. They were only too grateful for the chance to avoid the Master, so they happily left the 'upstairs' stuff for Tish and Francine to do.

Sometimes during the day, when there was nothing specific to do and the Master hadn't given them any direct orders, they could retreat downstairs to the kitchens or somewhere. That was definitely the best part of the general routine, though the conversation wasn't exactly brilliant. None of the serving staff were allowed to speak, and the military guys only when asked a direct question. Consequently, a kind of sign language was building up. Name signs were the most common thing, followed by indications of rooms and tasks. Soon, though, as with any large group of people, the gossiping started. The pastry girl apparently had managed to strike up a relationship with a plumber, who Tish's dad happened to know. The guard who was posted on Rose's door between noon and three was a real bastard and to be avoided at all costs. Obviously Tish delivered lunch about then, but thankfully there was a camera trained right on him so nothing ever happened. He thought he was God's gift, it seemed.

There were quite a few of them like that. The younger servants tended to stick together for safety in numbers, but the older ones and the higher placed ones assumed an air of power which was completely ridiculous. The younger ones reacted accordingly, with scorn or pity, and hence began the attempted subjugation of the lower ranks. The head cook, a large woman in her mid-fifties, was an absolute ogre. She was free with her slaps to reprimand for mistakes and ruled with an iron fist. She tasted everything, which was probably why she was so fat, and if your seasoning was just slightly off, she made you start again. Three people were cooking any one component just in case two of them were wrong. The problem was that obviously they couldn't communicate what was wrong with the food, at least not until a proper vocab had been built up in sign language.

Everyone knew why the ogre was so terrible, though. It was she who got the blame when the food wasn't to the Master's satisfaction. You almost couldn't blame her. Except that was what the young did best: they blamed. And so the war continued.

Annoyingly enough, Francine had made friends with the ogre, thanks to the stupid half past two snack saga. Because Francine also got the Master's rage when the food was wrong, the ogre had started to help her with The Snack. It needed capital letters, in Tish's opinion, what with the fuss it caused. First, it gave the Master a direct opportunity to comment on Francine's mothering and wifely abilities, and he wasn't exactly complimentary. It was the easiest way to get to her. Blame her for getting them all into this mess, tell her that she'd betrayed her family, and that she was a terrible cook to boot! Honestly, it was surprising that she'd managed to bring up three children without accidentally poisoning them.

The other problem with The Snack was that it highlighted the difference in status between the Joneses and the other staff. They were higher but lower at the same time. Higher because the Master took notice of them and because they had such a fancy uniform and because they did all the upstairs stuff, but lower because they were the Joneses, and they were essentially prisoners of war. They didn't sleep in the dorms with everyone else, but in a tiny little room off to the side, all three of them. That caused an odd kind of sympathy mixed with resentment, and it varied from person to person as to how they'd deal with that.

It was a whole other world, an underworld. A whole other level of social interaction to deal with. Tish had quickly chummed up with one of the girls who did tea, whose name she thought might have been Alex, or Alexa, or Alexia or something along those lines. She'd tried air writing it once and there had definitely been a capital A. Tea was a good job, because once they'd got it right once, they knew exactly how to do it, and the Master wasn't one for change. He didn't go for fancy herbal teas or green teas, he just had your bog standard cup of tea, teabag in for thirty four seconds, six grams of sugar and served at sixty eight degrees centigrade. Easy. The tea makers were really envied. It was the sauce and jus gang that were pitied.

The other relationship that Tish was building up was with Rose, who was under no restriction of speech. So when Tish cleaned her room (less often that everywhere else, only once every three days in case the cleaning products affected her health), Rose would witter away, talking to her about everything and anything, from the GCSEs she'd taken, to her job, to the planet of Lyola. The Doctor would join in too, telling her about adventures her sister had taken, and Rose would ask all the questions that Tish really wanted to ask but couldn't. She actually enjoyed those cleaning sessions. When the Master was in the control room, though, everything stopped, and Tish worked in silence. Rose would sit and stare out the window and the Doctor would watch them all with sharp eyes.

Tish couldn't help but feel a slight resentment to the Doctor. Not that she didn't respect him, and understand his motives, but he'd sent Martha off God knows where, and that was a hard concept to get past. Then there was just the alien-ness of him. When he was telling stories with Rose, he seemed very human, but then he would catch the Master's gaze, and the sheer depth of emotion there was the most alien thing she had ever seen. No matter how many times she told herself that the Doctor was on their side, it was hard not to get a bit xenophobic when you were being so utterly suppressed by another of the same species.

But it wasn't only Tish who was finding a new level of friendship here. She'd noticed that her parents had stopped hating each other quite so much in the weeks since they'd been here. Well, it was kind of hard to argue without words. It was also an absolutely idiotic idea to argue when you shared a room that barely fit you, not to mention your grown up daughter who could really do without the domestics.

They didn't see much of her dad during the day. He worked downstairs, doing plumbing or engineering or something else manual. From what they could gather at the end of each day, he had it considerably harder than them, at least as far as physical work was concerned. He was exhausted every evening, though in the long term it was probably good for his health. That was what Martha would say, if she were here.

But it was even more difficult to argue if you were lacking not only the words, but also the energy. Her mother had started taking care of her father in a way that Tish had never seen her do before. Give them a few weeks and they might even start to become something resembling friends. Give them however long they might end up living here, and who knew what would happen?

Tish's friends used to say that her parents would end up back together or not speaking to each other for evermore, and the latter certainly wasn't happening. Not if you counted arguments, at least. God, they'd been sniping at each other for months through the medium of the phone or their children. Usually the latter. And it seemed to Tish that as the days stretched into weeks and the weeks became indistinct and the notion of months ceased to mean anything, her parents were beginning to realise that a mid life crisis and hypercriticism could be overcome. Or maybe they were just lonely. Or maybe they were just reacting in the same way to the plight of their children.

Tish was the easiest and also the most difficult to worry about, just because she was there. Francine in particular was always touching her, brushing her hand during the day and hugging her when they got to the safety of their cell, and the contact comforted them both. But Tish was safe, in a way. Her fate was sealed as an eternal servant, and so long as she didn't do anything too wrong, she would stay alive.

Martha, their little girl, was an enemy of the state, of the Master; the two concepts were the same. She was in constant danger of assassination, of being found and brought to her death. Worse, she could be killed by a random vagrant on Earth for her clothes or food or currency, and they would never know. The world would be doomed, and Martha would be gone, and they would have no idea until and if her body was uncovered. For her part, Tish who had come to rely on Martha as a family mediator and possibly the only other sane Jones, had suddenly begun remembering the days when Martha was just her baby sister, and needed protecting. The idea that she was suddenly in charge of the fate of the entire planet, all on her own… it was impossible to comprehend. World-saving should be left to people like the Doctor, not her baby sister, no matter how many times it seemed she had saved the Earth before.

And then there was Leo. There was no point worrying about Leo.

When the day had ended, when the last cleaning implements had been returned to be signed back in, in order that they should not be used as any type of weapon, the Joneses would reconvene back in their little cell, Francine and Tish often long before Clive. Tish always tried to get to sleep as soon as she could, but it was so difficult. Every single night, her mind drifted off to her siblings, and she wondered which of the three of them had got the worse deal. Sometimes, it was difficult to call.


	16. Not as daft as he looks

**CH16 Not as daft as he looks**

The day that Tish's little brother was found, it had been one of those days when Tish was cleaning Rose's room. The Doctor had been telling them about meeting Shakespeare, and Rose had been berating him for not taking her to meet the Bard, not that she'd particularly got into his stuff when she'd been at school, but still!

When the Master came in, however, they both shut up immediately. Tish decided that now would be a brilliant moment to move onto the bathroom. With the door shut.

"Momentous news!" the Master cried. "Fantastic news! Marvellous news! And where would you be going, young Leticia? Come back here, I've got the most magnificent news!"

"And a fetish for thesauruses," Rose murmured. She could get away with more than the rest of them.

Tish moved slowly back into Rose's main room, but she kept her head bowed. Rose moved towards her, but stopped short of actually touching her. Solidarity was one thing, but anything more would most likely not be tolerated.

The Master, however, was not paying attention. "You there!" he commanded a guard who happened to be standing dumbly at the door. "Head to the main docking port and run back up here immediately when… Well, you'll know when. I wouldn't like to spoil your surprise."

This last was aimed at Tish, whose mind was already going into overdrive.

"And you!" Another guard snapped to attention. "Fetch the Joneses. And be quick about it!"

The men snapped out the customary quick salute, then sprinted off to their duties. Tish wished she had some of their energy; she felt like she was going to faint. Because what other news could there be but news about Martha? And if the Master was happy, then what did that mean? That she was dead? That she had been captured?

"What's going on?" the Doctor asked sharply. He had sat up and moved away from Rose's wall, the natural urge to be involved coming out.

"Don't you worry, Doctor, you'll soon find out," the Master smirked, but he was distracted, disinterested in him.

Tish saw this and felt a harsh wave of relief. If this were about Martha, he'd be tormenting the Doctor with it, not Tish. The humans meant so little to him. Surely he wouldn't be wasting any time baiting her when he could be baiting his fellow Time Lord. Martha must be alright. Thank God.

Later, Tish would be ashamed that she didn't immediately think of her brother. But her mother was being bundled into the room, with wild eyes and a cloth still in her hand. She was clutching it as though it would save her: she had no idea what was going on. Tish pushed her morbid theorising out of her mind and half ran out of Rose's room, round the corner and back into the main room to join her mother. She ignored entirely the brute who was posted on Rose's door, though were she not so scared she would have felt a bit smug that he was being left out of proceedings. Knowledge was power in a world ruled by an insane genius. True power only got you killed.

Tish and Francine grasped each others' hands, trying to communicate with their eyes alone, then finally resorting to letting each other go free to sign. But there was nothing to say, nothing that they knew.

"Francine, Francine, Francine," the Master sighed. "So glad that you could make our little gathering."

Francine leapt to attention, standing just close enough to Tish that she betrayed the sense of danger she still felt.

The Master smiled almost fondly at them. "I was just telling your darling little girl that I have news. Marvellous news!"

"What news?" Rose asked. She had moved towards the glass wall, just to the side of the Doctor's cage. "I mean, you're gonna tell us, so you may as well do it now."

Francine shot a half grateful, half fearful glance towards the girl. Grateful for asking the question, fearful as to the answer.

"All in good time, my dear," the Master assured her. "I think this news is best shown, not told."

The door whirred open once more to let Clive through. Immediately he moved to his family's side, eyes darting around the room for any helpful information, but of course there was none. He hadn't seen this room since that first, fateful day, and he was taken aback by the glass wall and Rose's new room, but then the Master entered his field of vision and his face creased into a look of resentment and hatred.

"Clive!" the Master welcomed him. "We have news!"

"You have news," the Doctor said, evenly. "So far, we've all been kept rather in the dark."

"All in good time," the Master insisted.

Like any good servant, Tish knew the Master very well, even after these scant few weeks. She knew his moods and his idiosyncrasies and his bizarrely regular routine. Consequently, she could read him like a book, and now she was realising that he really was remarkably pleased with something. They'd been pushing him, Rose and the Doctor, asking questions, pressing for information, and yet he hadn't once snapped at them. But why?

She jumped, as did her mother and Rose, when the first guard burst into the room, slightly out of breath.

"They're here, sir!" he said, not quite maintaining the practiced professional tone of voice.

The Master wheeled around from where he'd been contemplating the Joneses, huddled off to one side, and beamed at him. Light glinted off his gleaming smile, the perfect picture of a lunatic. "Fantastic!"

It felt like the room itself was hyperventilating. Francine was shaking, and Tish wondered if her mother thought this fantastic news was about Martha. For her part, she was having doubts about her previous convictions. Someone was here. But not Martha?

Oh God. It wouldn't be…

As soon as he was dragged into the room, Francine screamed, a little breathy scream that was hardly above a whisper. Clive held her back, his eyes fixed on the struggling figure, and Tish stood stock still, disbelieving.

For some reason, the idea that Leo had been captured hadn't occurred to her. Leo didn't belong in this world of domination and servitude and cruelty. Leo was part of a different reality, one which included family tiffs and her niece and laid back, easy, living. He looked so wrong, eyes wild and hands bound, fighting against the hold of two trained men.

"Get off me! Fuck off, you bastards. Traitors!"

He sounded so wrong, swearing in the presence of his parents, his voice filled with a righteous fury.

"Let him go!" Clive demanded. This sight overrode any commands for silence.

The Master pouted, as though considering it. "No, I don't think I will."

"Leo! Leo, oh God..."

Francine was the next to speak. She had stopped trying to break free of her husband and now she clung to his restraining arm.

"Mum! What the hell, why are you here?"

Mother and son looked at each other with a gaze full of desperation but she didn't speak again. Instead, she glanced towards the Master, and that was enough for Leo to turn his ire back to him.

"What the fuck are you doing with my family? Let them go, you fucking bastard!"

"Be quiet," the Master said in a very normal, pleasant tone.

"You can't tell me to—"

But of course he could, because he was the Master, and because he had taken out his laser screwdriver and turned it on Leo, and his scream was worse than his shouting, and the tears were streaming freely down Tish's face, and still she couldn't move.

"Stop!" Rose begged.

"He'll be quiet," the Doctor promised. "Master, please."

There was a brief pause, in which no one dared speak, and then:

"Oh, alright then," the Master grumbled.

Tish noticed a brief look of triumph in the Doctor's eyes, and wondered how much this small victory meant in the grand scheme of things.

Leo was lying on the floor now, panting, trying and failing to get up. Francine ran to him as Clive's grip slackened, helped him raise his head, held him to her, and Tish was remembering the time when he had been hit by a table thrown by her boss in monster form and Martha had diagnosed concussion and told them to give him air and Tish had left him to go running after Martha and the monsters and still she could not speak.

"Oh!" The Master slapped his forehead. "I'm forgetting someone. This is supposed to be a family reunion, and yet we're missing someone."

The only person who didn't immediately gain a sickly pallor was Leo, and that was because he already looked as terrible as he could.

"No," Rose breathed.

Tish locked eyes with her, and wondered why she cared. There was obviously the fact that she was a regular person, with at least regular empathy. Then there was the affinity she had with Martha via the Doctor. And then the relationship of sorts she'd been building up with herself and Francine. But beyond that… Rose had never spoken to Martha, or if she had, it'd been three words at the end of the world they'd grown up in.

And because Tish was not in the mood to believe that Rose could care about Martha just because she would care about anyone in that situation, she suddenly deduced that Martha wasn't just wandering planet Earth, doing whatever she could not to get caught. No, for Rose to care, Martha must be actually doing something useful.

Right in the middle of a nightmare, Tish suddenly felt a flame of hope, which was immediately doused as she remembered that Martha might be dead or dying or captured.

"Now, don't look like that, my dear Rose," the Master crooned. "Miss Jones won't be joining us today. Still, I can send out a broadcast to Sol 3, Earth to you. We wouldn't want little Martha to miss the party, would we?"

Suddenly, with the same joyous energy that the Doctor always had, he was darting around the room, dragging out a camera from where it had been stowed in the corner of the room after it had filmed the assassination of the President of the United States, flicking a few switches, then running back up to the bridge, throwing levers, twisting dials.

By this stage, Leo had recovered sufficiently to try and sit up, to attempt to do something, anything, and Francine was silently begging him not to move. Clive stood resolutely over them, in the traditional manner of the man of the house, and Tish finally found herself able to move. She ran over to her brother, almost tripping on the way and glancing fearfully up to check that she wouldn't be discovered.

"Tish," Leo said, his voice still hoarse. "What the bloody hell is going on here? Where's Martha?"

A quick glance at her mother confirmed that she hadn't said a word since her first emotional outcry. Tish took a deep breath. "You saw the broadcast?"

"Bits," he replied. "The rest I heard about from Boxer."

"The Master—Harold Saxon—he's an alien. So's the Doctor, but he's on our side. Martha was with him. She's trying to stop the Master."

Her voice felt strained, unused. How long had it been without saying a word?

"What about you?"

She shook her head, but tried to answer anyway. "We're leverage, I think. Us and the Doctor. Against Martha."

"God, Tish, this is mad. I mean, this is Martha!"

"Speaking of, I've established a connection!" the Master announced. "All ready to go as soon as I say 'action'. So you can all shut up and think a little bit more about that easy-peasy rule of absolutely no talking, and I'll start with my lovely little entertainment program, the only unmissable show, which desperately needs a title. Ideas?"

"Master—" the Doctor began.

"Nope, that's my name," the Master pointed out. "Rose, you've lived on Earth before. Telly programs related to families? Families and their fates? Oh! I've got it!" he crowed. "Family Fortunes!"

Leo looked incredulous. Unlike the others, he hadn't been subjected to the Master's bizarre taste in popular culture before. "You what?"

"I thought I told you to shut up!"

His voice wasn't angry, excited as he was, but there was that ever-present undercurrent of power and of menace there; Francine put a hand on her son's shoulder, and he did indeed shut up. Tish prayed that he wouldn't try the Master's patience again.

The Master waited a few seconds, but no one spoke. As Tish looked around, she could see Rose trembling, the Doctor glaring and the rest of her family scared to death, all focused on the Master. He really did have mastery over them. They were all slaves, all puppets, and he held a ubiquitous pair of scissors over their strings.

"Better."

He turned away to shift the camera into position, and Tish wondered why he didn't just get a guard or someone to do it. He really liked to be involved, she realised. He wanted to be the one to do… whatever it was he thought he was doing. He wanted the credit, the glory, even if there was no one to give it him.

"Now, Francine, Clive, Letitia, if you could stand over here."

They all moved immediately, leaving Leo prostrate on the floor. Francine, to be fair, wasn't given much choice by Tish, who grabbed her and pulled her away. There was nothing they could do.

"No, you're blocking the Doctor, I want her to see him," he complained, and Clive shuffled across obediently. "Ah, Rose, if you'd just move across, ever so slightly. Perfect!"

What must Leo be thinking? wondered Tish. To see them all do his bidding even without a threat. To see his headstrong mother and stubborn father leave him helpless.

"Action!"

A light flicked on. The camera hummed. The show began.

Sometimes, Tish thought that if Leo hadn't shouted at the camera, told Martha not to listen to a word this fucking Nazi was telling her, to forget about him, to carry on with whatever it was she was doing, if he hadn't ruined what looked like a perfectly scripted performance, if he hadn't gone so far as to touch the Master, to push him out of the way in order to stare down the lens, then maybe he would have been here on the ship, working like the rest of them. Maybe. Or maybe it would have made absolutely no difference, and the Master had planned this all along, and she would always have heard her mother scream and her father bellow and Rose shriek and nothing but silence from herself, from the Doctor, from her brother as he collapsed and died, just like that. Gone, just like that.

Maybe Leo planned it. Maybe he was trying to push the Master, trying to make sure he didn't spend his days as he saw his defeated family now.

Or maybe he knew that someone had to say something to Martha as she tried to save the world, all alone, abandoned. Maybe he wasn't as daft as he looked.


	17. Exit Wounds

**CH17 Exit Wounds**

Leo's body was incinerated, as had become the norm on Earth. It was either that or mass graves, and they were deemed by the Master as a waste of space. As Jack had predicted, the intelligentsia was systematically being eradicated. UNIT had been forced to scatter and go underground, what was left of it. Torchwood 2 no longer existed. The Hub at Torchwood 3 had been stripped bare, the technology scavenged by the Master to be converted into artefacts still more impressive.

Meanwhile, at much the same time that Leo was murdered, one of NASA's spy planes was returning from Nepal with very volatile cargo. This cargo was delivered, some intact, merely hours later.

The first Jack knew of all this was when the Master came bounding along to the dead end where he was chained up.

It was very boring, being down here. Jack knew essentially nothing of what was going on in the rest of the ship and was left down here to merely worry about it. He could make pretty clear guesses that certain people wouldn't be killed, the Doctor being a prime example, but after so long without communication it was difficult to maintain the strength of mind to carry on believing that.

Hence it almost cheered him up to have a visitor. At least it would have done, had that visitor been someone, anyone else.

"This is a brilliant day," the Master announced. "I'm ticking so many boxes on my to-do list; it's a bureaucratic triumph!"

"You didn't strike me as the kind of guy who went for bureaucracy," Jack noted dryly.

Jack had made the executive decision not to respond to the Master. Vulnerable as he was, he needed some way of maintaining control. If emotional control was all he could do, then so be it.

The Master, however, didn't even blink. "Very perceptive of you, Captain! When did you take up pop psychology?"

"Probably about the same time you took up politics," Jack answered coolly.

That made the Master stop and look at him. "Oh, that's not true." He stalked forward. "I was a political creature from the moment I came into existence. There are politics of entire worlds based on me."

Jack had to reflect that this was probably a fact.

"And since we're talking about existence, Mr Harkness..." The Master was close up in Jack's face now, their noses almost brushing each other as eyes locked and probed. "... Would you care to explain to me how your own perverted one came to be?"

"I'm assuming you're not referring to the birds and the bees," responded Jack, quirking up a smile in a serious face.

The slap wasn't a surprise. The broken nose would heal.

"Tell me!" the Master roared, pulling away.

Jack laughed. "You don't scare me."

The Master calmed, his anger flicking off like a light bulb to leave a mockingly thoughtful face. There was no trace of the outburst. "No, I suppose I don't. I can't kill you, you're already imprisoned without any basic amenities, what can I do to you, Jack?"

The Time Lord was stalking now, circling him, and his voice became steadily crueller with every word. "What can harm such an abomination, such an aberration of nature?"

A pause.

"You still feel pain, don't you Mr Harkness?"

Stubbornly, Jack waited until he could look into the Master's eyes. "Yes. I do."

Abruptly, the Master wheeled away. "But that's not good enough!" he complained. "You've had pain, you've died so many times, and believe me, I know what that's like, and yet still here you stand!"

Responding to the change in mood, Jack smirked. "Life sucks, huh?"

There was a glint in the Master's eye as he pretended to consider. "No. I'm not sure it does. How could I take over the Earth if I were dead?"

"Yeah, well those of us with less world-conquering tendencies can see the advantages to death," Jack countered.

The glint became a glimmering light as the Master frowned. "Ooh, philosophical. This debate could go on forever. Tell you what, why don't we get a third opinion? Someone with a rather more normal mortality, what do you think? Good idea?"

This was the point the Master had been aiming for, Jack could sense it. He tensed, even while he knew he was completely helpless, and did not reply.

The Master grinned. Without breaking eye contact, he spoke: "Bring her in."

Gwen? Tosh? God help him, was it Alice? Not Martha, surely. Tish? Francine?

Tosh.

Jack couldn't help but feel a surge of pride as Tosh was brought in. She wasn't panicking, or fighting, and although he could clearly see that she was terrified, she was still looking around for assets.

Then she saw Jack's prone position, and her already pale skin faded a little further.

"Hey Tosh," he greeted her, even managing a small smile.

The young Japanese woman didn't look too bad, all things considering. Only a couple of bruises.

"Jack," she breathed. "I'm sorry."

One of the men holding her shook her roughly to stop her speaking, but the Master stepped in and put a hand on the man's arm, holding him back. Evidently this conversation would happen with his blessing.

"Everyone else gone, then?"

It was with more than cynicism that he asked. It was pragmatism; he needed an answer to this question and so he had to ask it. Better to ask now than have the Master tell him later.

To his surprise, Tosh shook her head fiercely. "Gwen got out," she told him.

"But not Owen? Or Ianto?"

"Owen... they got Owen straight away. Ianto was killed on the journey."

United in grief that they didn't dare show, Tosh and Jack stared at each other hopelessly. They both knew there was nothing they could do.

"But Gwen's safe," Jack reminded them both. "Bet she's out there saving the world."

Tosh smiled, weakly.

Finally, the Master couldn't stay silent any longer. "The world doesn't need saving," he ruled.

"Please," scoffed Jack, reverting to his usual sarcastic manner now that Tosh was here.

"No, actually, you might be right!" the Master decided. "I think the world needs saving from you lot. I'm told your little friend—Owen, did you say?—was quite violent when you were picked up."

"He got three of them before they got me," Tosh informed Jack. She swallowed. "They had a gun to my head. He surrendered."

"Weakling," the Master said derisively.

"Human," retorted Jack.

The Master raised an eyebrow. "Exactly."

"What are you?" Tosh asked.

Before answering, the Master stepped forward from the sidelines, placing himself firmly between her and Jack. He faced her, standing close, maintaining eye contact, and only when she was staring into his eyes did he speak:

"I am the Master, and you will obey me."

From his position behind the Master, Jack couldn't see the small changes in Tosh as the order was given. If he could, he would have seen her posture slacken slightly, her expression relax a degree and her eyes glaze over a little.

As it was, he saw none of these things and so was slightly surprised when there was no immediate response.

"She's not your slave," he said.

"No," the Master agreed. He turned back to face Jack and grinned. "She's my puppet."

Still grinning, he stepped aside. "Let her go," he ordered.

As her captors fell back, Tosh didn't move. Literally, not a muscle twitched. Bearing in mind that the guards had been supporting some of her weight, she should have collapsed, but no. It was a bizarre image: her feet were apart, her knees slightly bent, her arms thrown wide where she had been held back. And although he couldn't be certain in the poor light, Jack fancied that her pupils had dilated to the extent that the irises were barely visible.

"Stand up straight," the Master said, with the air of chastising a favourite niece.

Immediately, she was standing to attention, upright as a poker. There was no transition from one position to another; it was as though someone had flicked over a page.

"Mind control," Jack hissed.

The Master sighed. "Correct him."

With her eyes unfocused, unseeing, Tosh began to speak.

"Hypnotism. Differs from mind control in many subtle ways. Mind control involves a mental link. Toshiko Sato is not conscious. A favourite trick of my Master. This is a strong degree."

Her words were utterly detached and inflectionless; the monotone was eerie in its flatness. The voice, though, was still recognisably Toshiko's, with her pronunciation. The overall effect was haunting.

"Call it a signature move," the Master volunteered. "Very useful. What you see here is complete control, no initiative whatsoever. She does nothing unless I tell her, except of course the basic life functions. Obviously that's not practical for every day use: she wouldn't make herself eat or drink or move at all, really. This is just for special occasions."

Jack was still staring at the shell of Tosh. "So your SS guys..."

"Much milder. Lots of initiative, lots of character, just not enough to rebel. Observe." He turned to one of his men. "You don't mind, do you?"

The addressee, who was young and blond, started. "Of course not, sir, er, Master!"

The Time Lord ignored him and turned to the other, who was stout and had his hair shaved close to the skin. "And you?"

"It is an honour, Master," he said gravely.

Jack's mind was buzzing now. Could he exploit this in some way? Surely it had to be the Master's greatest weakness, relying on the single tactic for his complete control.

"Couldn't the Doctor override that, though?" he probed.

The Master snorted. "That would suggest he has stronger mental powers than me, which he doesn't. Anyway, Archangel cements it. So unless he's got fifteen ground to air missiles at his disposal, no. He wouldn't be stupid enough to try."

Jack watched him. "You know each other very well, don't you?"

"Spend a couple of centuries fighting someone and something's bound to rub off," the Master shrugged.

"You're like squabbling kids. Brothers," Jack suggested.

Suddenly, the Master was serious. "We are," he said. "The last children of Gallifrey. The last Time Lords in the universe."

There was a bond there, Jack realised. If the Master had wanted the Doctor dead then he would have died by now, and he was sure it worked vice versa, too. Still, that didn't mean that either one of them would hesitate to incapacitate the other in some way.

For example, locking one in a cage.

"Funny thing about hypnotism," the Master commented. "You can't hypnotise someone to death. Even Ms Sato here would break free on the point of death from dehydration. Assuming it were possible, she'd then crawl to water and eventually save herself. However, it is quite possible—easy, in fact—to hypnotise someone to cause death in others."

"I've been killed by friends before," Jack began warily.

The Master held up a hand. "Let me finish. The trick, therefore, is to give the cause of the suicide a more obvious aim. Like killing someone else."

From his pocket, he drew a small device, a rather non-threatening object to anyone who didn't know its creator. Black and non-descript, with a black plastic collar attached, it sat innocently in his hand.

Jack had to ask: "What's that?"

The Master looked down at it. "This? Oh, this is just something I knocked together this morning. An automatic-detonating device that releases Stet radiation, reacts only to certain chemicals. Haemoglobin being one of them."

"Blood," Jack breathed.

"A major component thereof," the Master amended. "I think you can see how this will work?"

Jack didn't answer.

"We'd best tell Ms Sato," the Master added. He turned to her. "Wait five minutes from now. Then shoot Captain Harkness through the head. Use this gun"—he presented one to her from his bottomless pockets—"and do not move once you've shot him. Do not listen to Captain Harkness, do not move fewer than three metres near him, do not let go of the gun."

"Yes, Master."

The Master smiled happily. "Quite poetic, don't you think? Dying through killing?"

"Quite horrific," Jack said.

There were no loopholes that he could see. Toshiko was going to die, he was going to die yet again, and everything was generally hopeless.

The Master ignored this comment, stalking towards Jack with his radiation device. Carefully, almost lovingly, he fastened it around Jack's neck, then paused to whisper in his ear: "By the way, she was wrong about Gwen Cooper. The Toclafane were sent after her. She died quickly, though."

Jack closed his eyes.

The Master drew back. "Well, I've only got four and a half minutes to evacuate the area, and set up the venting system, so I'll get to work on that, and you can have your last little chat with Toshiko. See you soon."

And so Tosh and Jack were left, staring at each other in a deathly silence.

Jack had never been all that good at dramatic silences.

"I guess you're not listening to me right now. Never stopped me before. I'm sorry, Tosh. I dragged you into this; I didn't even give you a choice. The others, they joined me. God, Ianto practically forced his way in. I told you it was Torchwood or death. I needed you. I remember when you first joined, and you were terrified of me. Jumped every time you heard my voice. You'd been in that holding cell for so long, you'd forgotten things about life. We had to set up your identity again, and in the middle of that you suggested you tweak the computer system a bit. I don't know what Torchwood would've been without you, Tosh.

"And I'm sorry I knocked your confidence so far. To be fair to me, you didn't have much before you arrived. Maybe if you and Owen had met before Torchwood, before me, maybe you would be out there somewhere, alive. Together. Why the hell wouldn't you two just talk to each other? Owen flirting with every girl he saw, you with... well, just Mary and Tommy, but you know what I mean. Ah well. It's all gone now, Tosh. If the base is gone, then so's Tommy. Sorry about that. Hell, why am I apologising? Hardly my fault.

"It's okay, Tosh. If you break free before you die, if you remember any of this, it's okay. It's not your fault. Probably your turn to kill me, actually. Hey, at least you get to die properly. Still not sure if that's good or bad, but maybe that's a good thing.

"How long d'you think we've got? Never been all that good with time. Doesn't normally mean that much to me. You and me both, we were never very good with remembering to sleep after a day's work. Or eat. Or drink. Or..."

Tosh raised the gun.

"Bye, Tosh."

* * *

He woke up to a pile of her clothes and a discarded gun. His dried blood caked the back of his neck where the device still rested, and he lifted his head to stop the tears taking the same trail downwards.


	18. I think you need a doctor

**CH18 I think you need a doctor**

Time was passing, in the interminable way that time does. According to the Doctor, it had been nearly three months since the death of the American President, and somehow that seemed impossible. How could any time have passed when nothing had changed? Rose was scared of becoming institutionalised. She hadn't left her room since she'd been put in it; she hadn't done anything at all besides eat, sleep, and stare out of the window or interact with the world beyond her glass wall. She felt like an animal in a zoo.

As of yet, the only excitement in her life had been the murder of Leo Jones. The Master kept everything else separate from their life onboard the Valiant. Sometimes he did update them on the progress of his transformation of the Earth, but it felt like another world. So what if the entire Amazonian rainforest had been cleared? They couldn't feel it, all the way up here. Theoretically, she was horrified at the Master's blatant disrespect for the environment of her home planet, but in practice it was hard feel something for anything that wasn't visible to her. She was riled whenever the Master tried to annoy the Doctor, irked when he spoke down to any of the humans onboard, scared when he barged into her room, but how was she supposed to care that he had slave labourers carving his face into Mount Rushmore? It was almost impossible to remember a world that existed beyond these rooms, beyond her own body.

Even within those parameters, nothing much had changed. All those things she'd learned about pregnancy when her teachers were trying to scare her off sex didn't seem to apply. No morning sickness, no cravings, no overly dramatic mood swings, whatever the Doctor might say, and she wasn't really showing yet. Sometimes, it was quite easy to forget.

Today, though, it wasn't.

The Master came bounding into her room a couple of hours after breakfast.

"We're at twelve weeks!" he announced. "Normally we'd have a scan now, and although I wouldn't say I'm a slave to tradition, I thought it would be best to subscribe to human methods for this."

"Scan?" Rose asked.

"Mm. Of the ultrasound variety. You know, have a look at the little one. Prop yourself up on this side of the bed and drink this."

Rose's eyes widened in comprehension as he shoved a bottle of water towards her, but before she could even think of responding, the Master was hurrying out to get the equipment; he never walked, that man. In a relaxed mode, he danced, and the rest of the time he marched or strode out, filled with purpose.

He did so now, wheeling in a large, unwieldy machine with brilliant precision through the door and positioning it next to the bed where Rose was now adjusting pillows behind her. She didn't look up again. In the interim of her imprisonment she'd become less scared of the Master. Or not less scared, but more accepting that besides acquiescing to his every request, there wasn't anything she could do to make life better. As such, she didn't bother standing up when he entered the room anymore. Neither did she speak. If she could, she preferred to ignore him, knowing that safety most probably lay in silence. Oh, occasionally she would make a dig or protest about something or other, the Amazon being a prime example, relying on her status here to brazen it out, but she had long since decided that it was normally safer to stay silent.

In fact, none of them spoke for a few minutes whilst wires were plugged in and screens adjusted and important-looking buttons pressed. For her part, Rose used drinking the water as a distraction. For his part, the Master seemed to be entirely focused on these little tasks and priming it all for action, but abruptly, he looked up.

"Aren't you excited?" he asked.

Choosing not to answer immediately, Rose threw an alarmed glance at the Doctor, alarmed because she didn't know how to feel. This was, after all, her baby. She had, therefore, thought of this little person being created inside her; certainly she had enough time for thinking, although she'd never brought up the topic with the Doctor. She didn't like acknowledging the paternity of the child and if she had mentioned it, him, her, then she would have been confronted with that harsh fact very bluntly. Still she had thought of her baby, and because she had no real idea what he or her would be like, she had imagined a very human child. A child that was hers.

How on earth was she supposed to feel at this moment? Should she be excited to see this first glimpse of her child? Should she be scared lest it be damaged in some way? Should she feel violated all over again because it would be the Master spreading the gel on her skin and running the scanner over her belly?

The Doctor was no help. His face was totally unreadable.

"Um, yeah, I s'pose," she finally said.

The Master pouted. "You don't sound it," he pointed out.

"Sorry," she said, mainly for a lack of anything else to say.

"But this is our child!" he said, impassioned. "This is the future of the Gallifreyan race! Of Gallifrey itself! Isn't that exciting, Rose? Isn't that utterly glorious?"

"Well—"

She broke off. Put like that, he was exactly right.

"Yeah," she said, managing a small smile. "Yeah, it is."

She didn't mention any of the other thoughts in her head, thoughts that she knew he wouldn't want to hear. Such as that she really, really didn't think it was the best thing for the future of Gallifrey to be directly drawn from the Master. Or that he evidently could only see the bigger picture. Even so, she felt just a bit guilty when she looked over to the Doctor and saw his frown at her agreement. Ah well, nothing she could do about that.

"And… we're on!" the Master exclaimed, flicking the last switch. He held out the small jar of gel to her. "You can do the honours."

Rose met his eyes as she took it from him. He was grinning.

In a matter of fact sort of way, she pulled up the pink blouse she was wearing (despite the regular laundry service, she was running out of alternative colours) and started smearing the gel over her stomach, just using her fingers, but the Master proffered a tissue when she was finished, followed by a bin to put it in. Prepared for everything: he would make a good boy scout. Besides the whole code of honour and the sense of community, of course. He was staring at her stomach as she applied the gel, almost as if we could see right through the skin into her womb. The look in his eyes was… well, it was acquisitive at worst and excited at best; there was no empathy there. He desperately wanted this child, but he didn't care for it.

Rose shivered.

The Master set down the bin with a clang, making her jump slightly, before snatching up the scanner. Rose wasn't exactly an expert on these things, but it looked very much the same as an ordinary Earth machine. Perhaps he'd tweaked it, or perhaps he hadn't. Was he purposely using human machinery because she was—or at least had been—human? Did he simply not have time to build a better one?

It didn't matter, really. She was just distracting herself from the sensation of the scanner gliding smoothly over her exposed skin, and from the flickering screen. But when she finally did look up…

"Oh my God," she muttered, eyes wide.

The Master, who had been staring intently at the screen, threw a careless glance at her. "What?"

"There it is," she said, not looking at him.

"What? Where?" he demanded. He was clearly itching to go and take a closer look.

"There," Rose said, nodding vaguely at the screen. "Can't you see it? Look, that's really clear, right now."

The Master spluttered for a second, but it was the Doctor who answered.

"He's never seen an ultrasound." He paused. "Neither have I."

Even at the sound of his voice, Rose didn't look away, so transfixed was she by the grainy black and white image.

"Print it off, and I'll show you both," she suggested. "I've seen loads. All Mum's ones of me, and Tony, and the girls' at work…"

She trailed off. That was her child right there, sometimes shifting out of sight into the shadow, sometimes coming into clearer focus, but undeniably there. It wasn't just an idea anymore. There was a little person in there. It was impossible to believe and the easiest thing in the world to accept both at the same time.

"Fine!" the Master snapped, breaking into her reverie. With his free hand, he stabbed a few buttons with unnecessary force, no doubt irritated that she could do something that he couldn't.

"Print a few, at about five second intervals," Rose instructed. "Sometimes it's easier to see than others."

Quietly fuming, he did as he was told for once in his lives, never interrupting the flowing movement of the scanner.

"It'll take a few minutes," he informed them in a low voice. Abruptly, he pulled his hand back, setting the handheld device back into its cradle. The screen blacked out and Rose blinked for the first time in too long, if the dryness of her eyes was anything to go by.

"Tissue."

She took it from him, and set about wiping the gel off her stomach, not quite comprehending that only a few centimetres below her fingers lay her baby. Even when she'd finished, she left her palm resting there, stroking a thumb over the skin as she would her baby's head. She barely noticed the Master snatching the tissue back and throwing it into the bin.

After a couple of minutes of silence, though, the machine coughed out half a dozen photos, spewing them into a little tray. Without thinking about it, Rose picked them up, just noticing in her peripheral vision the Master's hand coming to get them first. Glancing up, she saw his mouth working in a quietly livid pout, so she looked straight back down again. She flicked through the photos quickly for the moment, planning to look closer and longer later.

"Here," she said. "This one's the clearest."

She swung her legs out over the side of the bed so she was sitting perpendicular to the glass wall, close enough that the Doctor could see the picture too. The Master sat next to her, leaning over her shoulder. It was a bizarre sight, seeing him and her sitting thigh to thigh, heads close. It was a picture almost like it should have been.

"See, here's the head, so if you follow it down, there's the neck, and the arms, and that's its little feet, look."

Rose took a quick look at each of the Time Lords in turn, just fast enough to see the dawning comprehension a perfect mirror on each face.

"And is that, well, normal?" the Doctor asked.

Rose looked back at him, and he at her. He looked curious, as he almost always did, eager to learn, but still apprehensive. Almost scared.

"Yeah," she answered. "Exactly like all the ones I've seen. You'd never know it wasn't human."

"Well, you are descended from Gallifreyans," the Master commented, still looking at the picture.

She looked up at him, surprised. "Seriously?"

"Of course," he replied, as if it were really that obvious. "People like us, the outcasts, wandering round the universe; of course we left behind a few half-breeds."

"But what about Darwin, and coming from apes and all that?" she asked.

The Master laughed, derisively. "As if!"

Rose knew better than to feel offended. "So what really happened then?"

"Ah, it's a bit confusing there," said the Doctor. Rose looked back to him. "Originally, old Charlie boy didn't really publish anything at all, but you lot, you worked it out, a few millennia later."

"I thought it was quite fun," the Master said. "Carnage throughout the galaxies. I hadn't realised you had such a capacity for war."

"So the Council sent someone back to avert it. Found a likely-looking scientist, our mate Darwin, and steered him in the right direction for what you know as _The Origin of Species_," the Doctor finished, ignoring the interruption.

But the Master frowned. "Wasn't that you?"

The Doctor shook his head. "Nah, I was in disgrace at the time."

"Surprise, surprise," Rose muttered.

They sat like that a while, just in conversation. It wasn't congenial, or even polite, but the lack of outright insults was enough to make Rose boggle, and almost enough to make her believe that if they got through the next few months, she might be able to get her head round the idea that the man sitting next to her was the father of the child she'd seen for the first time today.

Then a guard ran in to inform them of a potential revolt in Eastern Europe with Martha Jones at the vanguard, and reality snapped back into place, along with the Master's utter inhumanity.

"So why are you telling me about it? Find her and get her here! Standard interrogation procedures..."

"He never could call a spade a spade," the Doctor said, darkly, as the Master stormed out. "Interrogation procedures," he spat.

Rose bit her lip and looked down at her photos. She couldn't contemplate that, not now. Gently, she traced the outline of her baby's head, studiously ignoring the anger, the horror, the torture that surrounded them.


	19. Everyone must burn

**CH19 Everyone must burn**

Such uprisings as the Eastern European one of three months in were not uncommon. Rarely did they come to anything; only a few were anything more than rumours. Whether such rumours were merely snowballing stories of hope or deliberate distractions from the work of the Underground, no one seemed to know.

Privately, the Doctor hoped that it was the former. If Martha was spreading rumours in a logical fashion to distract from her own journey, then whatever pattern she was using would no doubt be spotted by the Master. He himself paid close attention to the location and timing of each, but they did seem to be genuinely random. Either they weren't being perpetrated by the same person or group each time, or they really were nothing more than the legacy Martha Jones was leaving behind.

Whenever he thought of that, he had to smile. There was little enough cause for smiling these days.

As the weeks went by, the Master was settling more cheerfully into his role as world dictator. He focused less on the maintenance of the planet below and more on his own amusement. There were no more plans to be implemented, no more shipyards to be built; continuation was all that was needed, and his human lackeys could do that.

There were a few new inhabitants of the _Valiant _now. Numbering half a dozen or so, these were beautiful young girls, all in their late teens or early twenties, from varying countries. One particular girl was Brazilian, called Ana, and from a run down favela so insular that she had barely known that her country was being demolished around her, who little understood why she had been brought here and what she was supposed to do. The Master found it funny not to enlighten her and no one else dared or was able to warn her. The poor TARDIS could hardly translate for her now.

On the night he took her to bed, her screams needed no translation. Ana didn't appear again the next morning.

So the girls came and went, depending on their willingness and their sharpness, and the Master grew more and more confident in his mission. He began to talk freely of what he planned to do:

"I'll start with SagDEG. Well, there's nothing much in this galaxy, is there? There are the moons of Epsilon Eridani, but why would I bother having anything to do with those imbeciles?"

It didn't escape the Doctor's notice that he was using the human names for these galaxies and planets. For the first time in centuries, the Master had settled. Well, Earth always had been an addictive place.

In the meantime, Rose remained a constant companion beyond the glass wall. They still had their joking conversations over far off places and long gone times, but it all felt just slightly brittle. It wasn't that either of them had changed in their separation; they had, of course, but that wasn't the problem. Neither was it that they were unused to spending so much time together, because that was certainly not the case. No, it was merely that their reactions to being imprisoned like this were not of the same accord, and they were becoming more and more grating as time went on.

The Doctor, cooped up like an eagle with a hood and jesses, retreated further into himself. He passed more and more time slowly ingratiating himself into the Archangel network, spending his hours in silence and in melancholy. Oh, he knew he was being melancholy. Even if he hadn't possessed the necessary self-awareness to see it, he would have known exactly what he was doing from what he saw from Rose.

Rose, of course, was a hardy flower. She, with her human mind which dealt with things one at a time, managed to forget the plight of Martha from time to time and concentrate instead upon herself. It was probably a good way of coping, but the Doctor couldn't help but resent her a little bit for it. If Rose had one failing, selfishness was it. Not necessarily always selfishness for herself: sometimes it was for her species or her family or even for his sake. Still, he resented the way she could look at those black and white photos and smile, carefree for a moment. How could she be carefree?

"What's wrong?"

Her question took him by surprise one afternoon. "Nothing," he answered. "Well, nothing more than the usual."

"Liar," she accused him. "You're looking at me and frowning. What've I done?"

Typical, that she should indict him and then blame herself in the same sentence. No matter how much she had grown these past few years, she still wasn't quite sure of herself.

"Nothing," he assured her, but that only made her eyebrows draw together in a scowl.

"So what's wrong?"

He sighed. "Well, the Earth is enslaved, the Master's planning to take over the universe, Francine got a horrible bruise when he threw that soup bowl at her—"

"You know what I mean."

Selfish and stubborn.

He turned away from her to pace the cage a couple of times, but he couldn't get away from her searching gaze. Not for the first time, he vowed that when he got out of here, he was going to go and avert the creation of a few zoos.

"You know, I love humans. Some more than others. But sometimes…" He stopped pacing and looked her in the eye. "I don't understand how you think. You can look at those pictures and smile as though everything's alright."

Her eyes narrowed as she tried to see through the statement. "And you think I'm, what? Ignoring everything that's going on?"

"I think that you're putting it out of your mind, and I don't understand how you can do that."

She shrugged. "Like you said, human mind. I do remember it, it's just hard sometimes. I don't like to think of it, and thinking about it won't do anything, will it? So I don't. And the pictures just make it easier to block it out, y'know?"

And there was that smile, smaller this time, sadder, but still a smile.

"You block everything else out but that child, don't you?" he said quietly.

She looked at him. "That's not being human, Doctor, that's… well, that's being a parent. Not exactly a species-specific idea."

"And it doesn't bother you that it's his child, too?"

For the first time since 'it's bigger on the inside', she looked at him as though she really considered him an alien.

"Does it bother you?"

That drew him up short.

"Cos if we ever get out of here, it's coming with us," she pressed. "You know that, right?"

Funny, how he had been accusing her of not thinking of the situation they were in and yet this had never crossed his mind.

"Of course," he lied.

She considered him for a moment. "This isn't really about my attitude to the world, is it? It's about my attitude to my baby, which yes, is his baby, too, but only biologically."

He was getting slightly irritated with her, but he could sort of understand what she was getting at. Still, the whole conversation was vastly uncomfortable. This situation dredged up all the old memories from beneath the silt of the Time War for him. It was gentle torture, rasping at his mind like a file, forcing his most certainly not human brain to focus on it. Factor in that _it_ was Rose, that _it_ was the Master, that _it _was arguably half human, and the mental trauma was no better than it had been all those weeks ago when he had been forced to listen to the child's conception.

What the Doctor really needed, right at that moment, was to be able to not think about it, just for a minute. He might brand Rose selfish and unfeeling, but at the same time he envied her beyond belief. If only he could forget the past and the future, to focus on the present. Impossible, of course.

Perhaps, then, he just needed a distraction. As it happened, it was at this point that the Master came bounding into the room, leaping up onto the bridge.

"Round up the Joneses!" he instructed the hapless guard on the door. "We're nearly there."

"Nearly where?" Rose asked, drawing away.

They'd been drifting around the globe constantly since they'd first arrived but evidently Rose hadn't yet recognised anywhere from her window. Perhaps she, like the Doctor, had supposed that they would just carry on drifting.

However, he, unlike her, had some idea of where they were. His view of the windows wasn't the best, but fortunately for him, his Earth geography was second to none. Probably.

"Heading for north-eastern Asia, if you ask me," he told her. "We've been heading east over the North Pacific for a while."

"Right you are!" the Master affirmed. "Should only be a few minutes before it comes into sight."

"What, are we sight-seeing?" frowned Rose.

The Master, who had been staring impatiently out the front window, spun around to survey them. "Well, from there you won't see anything at all."

Bursting into action once more, he flung himself from the room, returning seconds later with four guards. The Doctor eyed them warily.

"You know, I really wish I believed this wasn't necessary," the Master muttered. "You're coming out," he said louder. "You have to see this."

And so the Doctor was hustled from his cage, and Rose from her room, to be frogmarched to the observatory. Rose was kept a few metres behind the Doctor at all times, and a small part of him noted that she was making a fuss.

"It's not like I've got anywhere to run to. I can't do anything. You could at least let me walk at my own pace. I've not done any exercise for weeks, you know…"

They wouldn't do her any serious fuss so, amusing as it was to hear her trying to make trouble, he tuned her out, concentrating on memorising his route. You never knew when knowing the exact schematics of your prison could be very useful indeed.

It didn't take a genius, however, to work out that they were heading downwards and towards the centre of the ship. Rose probably wouldn't have realised that, what with her terrible sense of direction, but it was blatant to the Doctor. He did wonder for a minute that the corridors they were following were all gleaming and polished, unlike the industrial bowels of the ship they had arrived in, but then realised that since they were going somewhere with the Master, it would be up to his exacting standards. The Master wasn't one to accept that only the destination itself was properly furnished; he would want the route spick and span too.

The Master himself was dancing ahead, spinning round occasionally to check on his captive followers and then racing off again, impatience clear in every action. "Come on!" he complained. "We'll miss it coming into view!"

"Why don't you go ahead?" Rose called out.

He was clearly tempted. But the Doctor knew that they wouldn't be left alone. For all his control of the guards, the Master didn't trust them any further than he could throw them. Unsurprisingly, then, their odd party remained together until they got to the observatory.

The observatory itself was, as the Doctor had guessed, right in the middle of the ship on the lowest level. In fact, it protruded from the underbelly of the ship like a perfectly hemispherical wart, oddly incongruous against the functional iron and steel, for it was made entirely of glass. It was quite impressive, as far as observatories went, if a little impractical for its sloping floor.

"Modelled on the Citadel, is it?" the Doctor asked upon arriving.

The Master shrugged. "Bit of an ironic artistic statement, I thought."

There was a hint of that: the fact that the glass dome was inverted for a start. The spiral staircase, although also made from reinforced glass, spoilt the perfect clarity of the structure. Nostalgically Gallifreyan, though, was the glowing red tinge to the horizon as they moved towards it.

Rose, the Doctor noticed, was squinting at it. "That's not the sunset," she said.

"Your knowledge of astronomy never ceases to amaze me," the Master mocked her. "The sun's over there."

Before she could snap back or inquire further, though, the Joneses arrived. It had been a good two months since the Doctor had seen Clive, but he didn't seem to be too badly the worse for those long weeks. Not physically, at least. There was a hardness about the man now that the Doctor didn't recall having seen before; it was a feeling he could empathise with.

But that wasn't really what he was thinking about.

The glow on the horizon was growing as they neared it, stretching and flexing like an unbreakable orange muscle. It loomed threateningly, beckoning with bright, grasping fingers that disappeared into billowing clouds of shadow.

"Fire," Rose breathed, disbelievingly. After all, this blaze stretched for miles, hundreds of miles from north to south. How could any flame be this huge?

The Doctor only stared.

"What is it?" Rose pressed, turning away. "What's burning?"

The Master swooped down from where he had been swinging on the staircase to place his hands on her shoulders, guide her eyes back to the conflagration and breathe in her ear. "Japan."

"Japan?" the Doctor asked, recoiling.

Oh, his brain accepted this as the feasible answer. A blaze of that size? The location? Yes, it all added up; his mind was more than capable of accepting those facts. Yet somehow, it was impossible to compute. Behind him he could hear gasps from the Joneses. Francine was crying. Tish was muttering something to herself, something that sounded like a flat out denial of the evidence her eyes were presenting her. Even the Master's hypnotised humans were staring with mouths open and eyes wide.

"They were getting a little annoying."

"Annoying?" the Doctor half-roared, wheeling around to face him before his two guards could catch themselves enough to prevent him moving.

"Mm," the Master confirmed. "One organisation in particular. Your Captain Harkness would know of them, I'm sure. Han Gaikokujin. Every time I thought I'd squashed them, they'd buzz back onto my radars. We caught their leader, lovely woman, if a little stubborn. Brilliant name: Otakujushi Kimiko. That's not a name, that's poetry! We eliminated her, and yet they kept coming back. Swatting them individually was getting on my nerves, so I thought I'd wipe out the entire swarm at once."

He said this all in a perfectly calm voice, and yet it was clear to all those assembled that he was loving this. The excitement bubbled under the surface of his words, the sheer joy at this sight.

What was it that made him enjoy this so; was it the sense of control? Was it the proof of his power? Was it relief at exterminating these pests?

His next words, soft as a sigh, revealed the truth: "Isn't it beautiful?"

There was an entrancement in the Master's eyes. While Rose and Tish and the others were all horrified by the sight of this, while they saw only the horror, the Master could see something else. He could see the fire for itself, not merely for its use. He could view those flames and admire the red-gold-orange-crimson-yellow-scarlet-amber ever changing flickers of colour. He could look at this destruction and see not the death, hear not the screams, but see the beauty and hear the powerful grandeur of the crackling tendrils of flame.

The Doctor could see that the Master saw this. But he himself could not even see the fire.

What he saw was another world, another time. What he saw was not a whole country, but a whole planet. What he saw was not Japan. It was home.

Did the Master see it too? he wondered. Did he see this as a reconstruction of the last moments of Gallifrey? Was this part of his grieving process, as twisted and bizarre as the rest of him?

Who was he to judge when he could not look away?

By now, they were so close that it seemed they were surrounded by fire. The ocean below was growing indistinct as the scorching furnace distorted the air with its burning heat. From Tish's throat came a hollow sort of moan as she gave up trying to deny what was so improbably true. The sound lay on top of the fire's roar, a faint tribute to the screams that must have echoed there. Just there. Only just over there.

And the most terrible thing was that the Master was right. It was gloriously, hideously beautiful.

Tish let loose a loud, keening cry before Rose's eyes rolled back in her head as she collapsed on the crystal clear floor.

* * *

_A/N: SciFiGeek14, do you remember, months ago, you said you hoped you weren't on my hitlist? Well, thanks to a friend of mine and some dodgy online translations, you've now been not only added, but crossed off. Otaku is roughly equivalent to geek, juushi is apparently the number fourteen, and I'm sure you can guess why Kimiko. But feel proud. You were enough of a threat to justify the destruction of an entire nation. May I add at this point that this was not my idea. It is stated by Tish in Last of the Time Lords that the Master made the Joneses watch the islands of Japan burning. I do not bear Japan any ill will. Unfortunately, the Master does. Well. Used to._


	20. It's time to change

**CH20 It's time to change.**

When Rose awoke, it was to pandemonium. People were shouting and someone was holding her and had she just fainted?

"Let me! Please, Master, just—"

"Shut up, shut up, shut up! We need to get her—"

"She's fine, trust me!"

"Why should I—"

"The foetus isn't in any danger, I promise."

"And how do you know?"

Rose blinked a few times. "What?"

And then it all came rushing back to her. She was in the observatory of the Valiant, watching Japan burn. She must have blacked out.

"Rose!"

The two Time Lords spoke at the same time, and Rose looked to locate the voices. The Doctor was a couple of metres back, two guards holding his arms. Ah, so he had wanted to go to her when she had fallen, but the Master had made them stop him. It couldn't have been more than a couple of minutes ago, judging by the fact that she could also see the Jones family, still looking horror-struck. Which meant that the Master was the one holding her. Great.

"Yeah, um, I'm alright," she managed, looking more at the Doctor since he was in her line of sight. And because he was really the one she wanted to know that.

"I'm taking you back to your room," the Master said, abruptly. Evidently he didn't trust her self assessment.

Without further ado, he lifted her into his arms, forcing her to put her arms round his neck in order to balance properly.

"I can walk," she protested. "I only fainted!"

He ignored her, and the look on his face was one she'd seen on the Doctor's. An all-consuming focus, and a grim one. He really was worried about her, she realised. Well, not about her, but about the child she was carrying. Of course! She'd collapsed so he was worrying that she was going to miscarry.

As soon as she'd worked that out, she was worrying herself. She wasn't going to miscarry, was she? She felt alright. No twinges in her stomach. Surely she'd feel something, wouldn't she? She desperately wanted to ask the Doctor, but for some reason didn't want to do so in front of the Master, who was in any case bearing her swiftly out of the room via the spiral staircase. Stupid Time Lord strength. She would have to wait, then.

"See you soon, yeah?" she called over the Master's shoulder, to where the Doctor was still being held back.

She didn't hear a reply, but then that might have been because they had left the observatory by that point.

"I'm alright," she said to the Master. "Seriously, I feel fine."

"And what do you know about your own biology?"

He hadn't even looked at her whilst asking, or rather scoffing, and Rose felt a bit miffed. "Enough. I mean, I've got a baby brother; I think I know a bit about pregnancy."

"Not Time Lord pregnancy, you don't."

She didn't mention that firstly, he was absolutely right and secondly, it was one thing seeing her mother pregnant and quite another being pregnant herself. "Well, neither do you."

Finally, he looked at her, only to glare. "Exactly! Now would you just shut up!"

She did, but only because she couldn't be bothered to argue. It had nothing to do with the fact that she was quite nervous, herself. Absolutely nothing at all.

When they did arrive back at her room, and the scans had all been carried out, and the Master had even performed a basic exam (he must have been swotting up), Rose finally allowed herself a sigh of relief. The Doctor was back by that point, though, and she tried to hide her reaction. After all, it was only a couple of hours previously that he'd criticised her for thinking only of her baby.

"I told you there was nothing to worry about," he said to them both, her and the Master.

Rose started to ask a question, but the Master got there first: "And how did you know?"

The Doctor sniffed, as though he'd been completely calm throughout the entire episode. "I've spent enough time with pregnant women to know that the foetus is more protected from falls than most people would believe."

"And the shock?" Rose asked despite herself. "Blacking out, that wouldn't affect it?"

"You were only out thirty seconds. Chances were you'd be absolutely fine."

She smiled. "Didn't stop you panicking. I heard you."

He grinned at her, and thank goodness shock didn't seem to be a problem, because he hadn't grinned at her like that in weeks. Admittedly, there was a touch of hysteria in both of them; they had, after all, just witnessed the murder of millions of people. She was still shaking, just a tad, still trying to erase the image burnt into her vision with smaller concerns and shallow teasing. Nevertheless, Rose took it as a very good sign.

"Right, so we're all good now, yeah?" she checked, and she wasn't just referring to the state of her body.

"You're not leaving this room again," the Master said, before the Doctor could reply. "I'm not risking it."

But Rose wasn't really paying attention. Instead, she was looking at the Doctor, who smiled again and nodded. They really were ridiculous, she realised. It took the possibility of eternal separation to admit they loved each other, and a disaster on the scale of nothing she'd ever seen for them to sort out a petty disagreement. Well, what did she expect? Their first date had been the end of the world.

Francine sometimes found it hard to believe that life could just carry on. Surely it wasn't possible that in the midst of all this horror and torture and… in the midst of all this, how on earth could she still get up and do her work? How was it possible that the Master could still be organising the mobilisation of his automated armies? How could it be that in the middle of all the death they had witnessed, Rose's belly was growing round and heavy with new life?

It had been months since Francine had had any realistic idea of how much time had passed, and so she used the stages of Rose's pregnancy as her guide, watching from afar. The day that she heard Rose squeal as something moved inside her, she noted that it must have been about four months, and life carried on.

Although it all seemed so static, so repetitive and hopeless, Francine was able to notice some changes. The Master grew more and more preoccupied with his child as signs of it became visible. Tish became more and more hard-skinned as the constant psychological and physical torment continued. And Clive…

They didn't see much of each other, and even if they did, they weren't technically supposed to speak. But the Master cared less about enforcing that rule as time went on, surely realising that if they were going to revolt, they would have done it already. And so they started to share a few words in the mornings or evenings, and even if they didn't mention their youngest daughter's name, they both knew that their own concern over their children was echoed just as strongly in the other. That was what was bringing them back together, thought Francine.

Because they were becoming closer again. Francine was letting Clive hold her when she was exhausted and bruised, and he was volunteering to do so. She was seeing now what she had first found attractive in him, all those years ago, and perhaps he was realising that while Annalise was a pretty young thing, Francine had all the beauty of shared memories. Not that Annalise was alive to know, anymore.

There had been no spectacle with Annalise's murder, not as there had been with Leo. She wasn't even brought up to the Valiant. Instead, the Master had just announced it to those on the bridge, bursting in with his disgusting, joyous enthusiasm to tell them that a girl had been executed, just for committing the crime of playing a minor role in the life of Martha Jones. For the first time, Francine not only pitied the girl, but felt sorry for her.

Clive hadn't even been there to hear. Francine had been forced to tell him in whispered half-sentences, the most she was confident to voice. He hadn't spoken at all.

The imposed silence had maybe helped them. It was impossible, in silence, to nag or to insult with petty comments. They had no privacy aboard this infernal ship, of course. They shared a small room with their daughter, and although Tish offered occasionally to bed down somewhere else, there was no real temptation to agree. Exactly what they didn't want the Master to know of, Francine wasn't sure, but she knew she was scared enough to not want to change anything, just in case.

Still, true stasis was impossible, and they grew slowly more and more back into their old life, the one where they trusted each other and respected each other and leant on each other. And on the day that Francine saw Rose undergoing a test for preeclampsia, she noted that it must have been nearly seven months, and life carried on.

It never failed to boggle the Doctor's mind, the way a terrible situation could bring out the best in humanity. Of course, it could also bring out the worst, but right now that wasn't the point. The point right at this moment was that he rarely felt camaraderie to this degree with humans. Usually they would band together, true to form, but he would always be left slightly on the outside, perhaps because of their instincts telling them he was alien, perhaps because he distanced himself. Either way, it was very different here aboard the Valiant.

Why was that, he wondered. Was it that they couldn't leave him out of conversations because they weren't allowed to speak even to each other? Was it that they saw the Master as the really alien one, and so warmed to him as the alternative? Was it just that they felt sorry for him?

He knew he looked absolutely pitiful. He hadn't washed for months, besides what he could manage at night with whatever drinking water he could spare. His hair lay lank and limp over his scalp. He no longer wore his jacket, using it instead as a pillow, blanket, even a flannel when he had need. He had originally used the lining for that, the scraps deposited outside the cage for Francine to take away (he loved that woman, he really did), but it had long since been used up entirely. Now, he had started tearing up his shirtsleeves, tiny bit by miniscule piece.

More than his aesthetic appearance, though, he knew that there was just that look about him, that look he'd seen in millions of prisoners through the centuries. He looked defeated, confined, lethargic, almost apathetic. His world was shrinking; it no longer comprised all of space and time, no longer included galaxies; no more was it anything larger than the Valiant. His daily existence was determined only by what was going on around him – the Master's ever more rehearsed daily routine, mainly. It scared him when he realised he was waiting for that time of day when Francine would bring the Master his daily snack. Was this what he had been reduced to? Anticipating the arrival of Tish in the evenings when she cleared up whatever clutter the Master had left behind, wondering precisely when Rose would brush her hair today?

In short, he was pathetic. And it was that more than anything that started him plotting.

He was integrated enough into the Archangel Network now to use it as the Master had and block his mental presence, if only for short amounts of time. Now was the time to use that, he decided. Rose was at thirty five weeks, so he couldn't realistically set up a jailbreak now, but there was no harm in planning ahead.

It was time to fight back.

* * *

_A/N: I offer no apology for my months of inacitivity WRT this story. I can only hope you're still out there, waiting. If you are, thank you. If not, well, I don't blame you and you're not reading this anyway._


	21. The abomination is insane!

One of the things that Jack had hated the most about the Time Agency was the red tape: the protocols and programmes and paperwork seemed to stretch on forever. On the one hand, he could appreciate that time travel was hardly something to go about lightly (although judging by how the Doctor did it, they should never have worried so much), but on the other hand, it was all just so boring. Protocol 654089: Manipulating the limits of the Novikov Self-Consistency Principle, for example, could have been summed up in six words: do whatever the hell you like. Instead, he'd had to go on a three day course and then have a telepathic lecture, compressed down to two hours rather than the twelve it would have taken at normal speed.

In short, Jack had always thought that a lot of his training had been a waste of time. Now, however, he was starting to appreciate certain aspects a little more.

Protocol 482601: How Not to Lose Your Mind.

That wasn't its official name, of course, but Jack had long since forgotten that. Anyway, it summed up the programme fairly well: it consisted of mental training for various different scenarios in which you might go mad. Excessive physical torture was one. Threats and dangers towards team members had been touched on briefly; Time Agents weren't supposed to form close relationships, and family members of existing agents were not permitted to join. But it was sub-section 231 that Jack was finding useful now: dealing with utter boredom and isolation.

Alright, so he wasn't entirely isolated: Tish came in to feed him and Francine cleaned around him occasionally. That said, they didn't speak to him, not a single word. The only verbose person with whom he was allowed contact was the Master, and he hadn't visited in months. After all, there were only so many ways you could kill a man, even for that psycho. He knew very little of what was going on upstairs, or even who was still alive. He was sure that Rose and the Doctor would be fine if Martha's mother and sister were, but beyond that? Nothing. No information, no reasonable guesses to make, and absolutely no one would be willing to tell him. Essentially, therefore, he was isolated of any company, and there was no denying that he was bored. Who knew how long it had been, but it had been a hell of a long time. Bored, helpless and alone.

So. Back to sub-section 231.

He couldn't remember the particulars exactly, but he recalled a really long section on memory. Remember as much as you can, it said, in as much detail as you can. Places, people, events, whatever might come to mind.

He started with the Hub in Cardiff. First he traced out the schematics, creating a blueprint in his mind. Then his office, the location of the furniture, the door. Then what was on his desk, what case files he remembered sticking up on his wall. Where was his coat, in this picture? The back of his chair or slung over the door? That door – exactly what shade was the wood? The shape of the handle, the location of the knots in the grain, the positioning of the hinges. Every time he thought about it, he stayed in the memory a little longer, with a little more detail, until he could pass hours in the contemplation of his office. Then the process was repeated with the main room with all its workstations examined one by one. He spent a long time remembering all the photos that various team members had tacked up.

And so it went on, for a couple of months. He drew out a mental map of Cardiff town. He came up with the internal plans for a tiny section of the TARDIS. He wondered if his mental image of the central console was anywhere near right, and did the mallet hang at this corner or that?

Then there were people. Long lists of all the people he'd ever known, from his family back on the Peninsula to all his various contacts in the Agency, to everyone he met when he was with the Doctor and Rose, to every Torchwood 3 operative from the twentieth century, to his family on Earth.

But here he hit a snag in his efforts to keeping his sanity, because where was Alice? His daughter, with whom he'd only really just formed a working relationship – what had happened to her? And what about Steven, his grandson – was he still with his mother?

This was the flaw in Time Agency training; since family members were never supposed to be involved, he had no official framework for dealing with this constant fear, not knowing where they were. Sure, he'd faced similar situations in his career, but never for this long. He couldn't stop agonising, and he couldn't be sure that this wasn't the route to madness.

Naturally, after all this struggling not to lose his mind, he was more than a little pissed off when he first heard the disembodied voice.

_Jack?_

He swore, loudly.

_Not the reaction I was hoping for, have to admit._

No, wait a minute. "Doctor?"

_Hello. I take it you've used telepathy before._

The telepathic lectures sprang to mind. _Sure._

_Good good. Just try to stay where you are, mentally; my head's a bit delicate at the moment._

Either he was going mad (and this was an elaborate way to start) or he'd have to go with this. _Right. What's wrong with your head?_

_You've missed quite a lot. Hang on a tick – I'll fill you in._

The sensation that followed was almost exactly like those compressed lectures. Rather than using words to describe Martha's mission, his own mental project and Rose's ballooning state, the Doctor pushed through the memories, almost like downloading a folder onto a computer without bothering to open each file. Even though Jack had been subject to this technique at the Agency, he was still a little disconcerted: there was suddenly a whole pantheon of thoughts in Jack's head that he had never actually thought.

_Okay, _he managed. _Okay. So the Master's trying to take over the universe by force. And restart your species with – Shit, is Rose okay?_

It was a stupid question, really; he knew exactly how Rose was now. He stopped for a moment to go through the new memories a bit: eight and a half months in a second. _She's started having false contractions!_

_Don't remind me, _came the response, in a slightly harried sounding 'voice'. _The panic up here is madness every time._

_Doctor, what the hell are we going to—_

But as with his delayed response to Rose's condition, he now felt the memories about the Doctor's plans. _The Archangel network, huh?_

_I thought it was rather neat,_ was the rather smug reply.

_If a little long-term._

_Hence plan B! You'll have to tell Francine and Tish – I'm under too much surveillance, and they won't be receptive to mental contact._

Plan B. The images flashed through his head: three o'clock, distraction, screwdriver, cage, Master.

_You think you can get control of the whole Valiant if you've got the Master?_ Jack thought, sceptical, remembering the hypnotised guards.

_If I'm good enough._

It seemed very far-fetched to Jack. There was no way that he and Clive could create a big enough distraction below decks that all the guards would be diverted out the way. Even if Tish or Francine did manage to get the laser screwdriver to the Doctor, he might not have enough time to use it, and he almost certainly wouldn't be able to get Rose all the way to the TARDIS.

_We have to try, _said the Doctor. _I can't leave her here. Or the baby._

Jack sighed and gave in. _A week after birth, then. She won't be able to move fast enough beforehand._

_Agreed. Gotta go, Master's here._

_Are you—_

But it was too late. Jack was just as alone as he had been before this brief interlude. But a little less bored, and a little less helpless.

* * *

It was another few hours before Jack had a chance to get a message to Francine, time that he spent analysing the positioning of the CCTV cameras in his cell. One pointing directly at the door, so best not say anything too controversial just as she was coming in, lest her facial expression give something away. One aimed directly at him, which was problematic, but assuming Francine was going to clean all around him, then he could time it so the angle was covering him.

This wouldn't prevent any hidden microphones picking up exactly what he said, but no matter how hard he thought, he couldn't think of a way to essentially plot against the Master without giving away any details. He would just have to hope that the Master wasn't monitoring him that closely any more. After all, he often rambled to Francine and Tish, and it was invariably completely lacking any juice for the Master. With any luck, that would work for him, now that he actually had to communicate sensitive information. If the CCTV cameras couldn't pick up on Francine's reaction to whatever he was saying, there would be no reason to check the audio files.

And if they did work out that he was plotting, well, they could only kill him.

Thus passed the minutes. Jack's ears pricked every time he heard someone outside, even though he knew by now exactly when everyone was scheduled to come in. The waiting was agonising, knowing that something was going to change. Monotony, he could deal with (probably). Frustration he wasn't so good at.

Finally, the door opened. He didn't bother to contain his grin.

"Well, hello Francine! How's your day been? Good?"

He rambled on in this fashion for a while, waiting for her to be in the right position as she mopped around him. It took a couple of minutes, but after a detailed account of exactly how boring his day had been, he began.

"Say, how'd you fancy a bit of a change in routine?"

She looked up at him sharply, then focused back on her bucket.

"Best if you don't look like you're listening too much," Jack warned her.

Obediently, she carried on with her cleaning, but was she going along with him or refusing all involvement?

"Look, we've got a bit of a plan to get us all out of here," he said. "All you'd need to do is get the Master's laser screwdriver to the Doctor. He keeps it in his jacket, right? So when he takes it off, you or Tish can get it. Is that alright?"

Mutely, Francine shook her head in a tiny gesture, not meeting his eyes.

He sighed. "Come on, Francine, if not for yourself then for your daughter. Your daughters, plural. Martha's down there somewhere - if we can get out-"

Abruptly she picked up the bucket and left.

"Well, shit."

Even after all this time, evidently the Master was as terrifying to her as he ever had been. Perhaps because of all this time. Well, she did have to deal with him a heck of a lot more than Jack did, and despite the Doctor's memories of the past nine months, he felt really quite detached from it all nowadays.

Perhaps he was losing it, he thought. What about Tosh? How could he be detached from the horror on board this ship when the Master had done that to her?

His fingers curled in rage, even as his mind ticked resolutely on.

How to motivate the Joneses to fight back? Maybe Tish would be more receptive to the idea, being younger. Maybe she'd be even more scared. But maybe if he could get her angry...

It was a lot of maybes, but it would have to do. They wanted to escape, sure, but he bet they wanted the Master destroyed more than they wanted a simple way out. But for now, there was nothing to do but wait for Tish to come back. Jack growled in frustration. He hated the waiting.

When Tish came in with his evening meal – if you could call it a meal – he wasted no time. Sod the CCTV – there was no way to cover this, given their positions. He dived straight in.

"Tish! I had an interesting chat with your mum earlier; did she tell you about it?"

She looked at him curiously – less fear, that was good – and shook her head.

"Well, I was just telling her that there was a plot afoot to get rid of our Lord and Master."

She drew back a little, but then recovered herself and loaded a spoon for him. He accepted the mouthful before pressing on.

"Thing is, we need you. You and your mum, or maybe just one of you, but there's safety in numbers, right?"

Then she really surprised him. Rather than trying to communicate with gesture alone, she actually spoke to him, albeit in a whisper.

"CCTV, microphones," she murmured.

"You really think he's listening after nine months of nothingness?"

She met his eye, grimly.

"Well, it's on my head, not yours. What you need to do is get the Master's laser screwdriver to the Doctor. There'll be a distraction at the same time, to get the guards away from you. You do that, we can get out of here. You do that, we can take down the Master."

Tish's breath was coming quicker.

"Now listen. He keeps the screwdriver in his jacket pocket, right? We'll pick a time when he's bound to have taken that jacket off. All you need to do is get the screwdriver, or even just the jacket, to the Doctor in his cage. Doesn't matter if the Master's still in the room. That moves the balance of power, okay?"

She gave him another spoonful of mush, and he tried to keep the intensity in his eyes while she spoon fed him.

"So. Will you do it?"

It took another two spoonfuls before she finally whispered, "Yes."

If he'd had his hands free, he would have punched the air. As he didn't, he merely grinned, his darkest grin. "We're gonna bust out of here."

He didn't mention the fact that he was almost sure that this plan had no hope in hell of coming off perfectly. You'd have to be insane or desperate to believe in it. Perhaps he should give up on protocol 482601.

* * *

_A/N: Yes, I'm back! A Levels are finished, and despite the fact that I now have a part time job, I feel very much like a 'lady of leisure' as my grandfather persists in calling me! Hopefully_, _therefore, these updates will be coming a lot more quickly. You never know, I might even finish off that Robin Hood story that I've left hanging for two years... Thank you for sticking with me, and thank you for all your reviews entreating me to update soon, even if I did have to reply with apologies most of the time._


	22. The child is lost

Everyone knows what the best part of birth is. It's the moment when it's over, when the child is put in its mother's arms for the first time, and everyone breathes a sigh of relief, and of wonder.

For Rose, it didn't happen quite like that.

* * *

For Tish, the worst part of the birth was how manic the Master got. He was running all over the place, sending the maids up and down the stairs to get more towels, more sheets, more cleaning products to sterilise the room, more earmuffs for himself, more food for Rose, more energy drinks for Rose, more this, more that, more everything. All told, Tish didn't get a moment's rest throughout the whole fourteen hours that Rose was in labour. She stole drinks en route to the kitchen; occasionally she managed to nab the odd biscuit. But every time she delivered something else to Rose's room, now wired up with medical equipment, the Master would see her and order something else. Towards the end, when her eyes were running with tears of exhaustion and her feet were bleeding in their prissy court shoes, she stumbled with a glass of water and the Master stopped and screamed at her. She didn't catch the words, but she did catch the back of his hand across her face, flinging her against the wall where her head cracked and her ankle twisted. Vaguely she was aware of Rose screaming and the Doctor yelling, but the Master was shouting over both of them, and in the end she just crawled out then hobbled downstairs to faint on her bed. She would wake up to blood on her pillow and fluff in her head wound and an ankle almost twice the size that it should be.

For Tish, that was the worst.

* * *

For Clive, the worst part was watching his wife and his daughter being run into the ground with exhaustion. Tish got the worst of it, but he barely saw her. It was Francine who was liaising with other staff members, heading down into the kitchens to relay orders or triple checking with the electricians that there were at least four back-up generators in case of a storm.

He caught her once as she rushed through the bowels of the ship to commandeer spare linens. She barely looked at him as she stormed down the corridor, so he reached out a hand and caught her elbow. He wasn't sure what he wanted to say to her, maybe that she needed to calm down before she did herself an injury.

But she slapped his hand from her arm and paused only long enough to shout at him, "Not now, Clive!", and that hurt so much more than the slap, because her voice was more than stressed; it was disdainful. It was patronising. It was exactly the reason why he'd first wanted to break up with her, when she had believed that her problems were so much greater than his and she had begun talking down to him. Here she was again, talking down to him, dismissing him out of hand when all he wanted to do was help.

For Clive, that was the worst.

* * *

For Jack, the worst part was not knowing. No one came to see him all day; there was no food from Tish, no one to clean up his mess, no nothing. It took him the best part of ten hours to convince himself that he hadn't merely lost track of time and that something really was going on. Even then, he still wasn't sure if Rose was indeed giving birth. Perhaps there had been an attack on the ship. Perhaps it was just Francine and Tish who were being kept away – had Martha been found? Did they have some other relative who might have been brought up here to be killed? Only the next day, once normal service had been resumed, did Jack find out definitively what had happened with a single word.

Tish had once again come in to spoon feed him tasteless mush, and as soon as she walked in he began flinging questions at her.

"Tish! What happened? Were we attacked? Rebellion? Did Rose give birth? Come on, Tish, just nod or something!"

She glared at him as best she could and he paused. "You're limping."

Indeed she was, and that wasn't all. A livid bruise had risen on her cheekbone, puffing up her eye and giving her glare a distinctly pathetic look.

"What happened?" he pressed.

She stuck the spoon violently into the food and muttered a single word:

"Birth."

And Jack swallowed his spoonful of mush even with wide eyes and the realisation that he still had a thousand more questions: was Rose okay? Was the baby? Boy or girl? Did the Master have the kid? Was Rose being allowed contact? How well was the baby being guarded? Would they have a chance of getting the kid out when they went for their hopeless breakout plan next week?

He couldn't ask any of these questions because Tish wasn't going to answer. He was stuck knowing nothing, entirely helpless and, worse, useless.

For Jack, that was the worst.

* * *

For the Doctor, the worst part was being so close and yet unable to help in any way. Through the bars of his cage and the Perspex wall of Rose's room, he could see every detail: the harried human midwives obviously terrified to death, but battling through, gently manipulating Rose, giving her advice and fielding questions from the Master.

"How much longer?" he would demand periodically, and they would have to tell him that it would be a few more hours; she wasn't fully dilated yet; if they hurried things along it could hurt the baby.

At one point the elder of the two, a middle-aged woman who ten months ago might have been stout, turned to the Master and suggested that he leave, because he was distressing Rose. The resulting diatribe was hideous to behold, and eventually the Doctor had shouted himself:

"Stop it! Let her do her job – think about Rose! And the baby!"

"Do you think I'd leave this room?" the Master screamed back. "Do you think I'd leave this to anyone else?"

"They're not going to hurt her – they know what they're doing!" the Doctor yelled.

"They have no idea! It's my child!"

"Yes, but—"

"Stop it, stop it," screamed Rose. Tears were pouring down her face. "I can't – please, stop it."

The younger midwife was at her side, stroking her hair back from her face and shooting fearful glances at both the Doctor and the Master now, and the Doctor felt terrible.

"I'm sorry," he said. "You're alright, Rose."

"Like you know what you're talking about," she joked through gritted teeth.

But the Master was standing, almost panting with anger. "I am not leaving this room!" he declared.

"Then don't!" Rose shot back. "But let them do it their way, yeah?"

Another contraction hit and she moaned.

"That's it, keep breathing," the elder midwife said. "Deep, slow breaths, well done, you're doing really well."

The Master was muttering mutinously, something about the stupidity of the midwives – as if anyone needed reminding to breathe! – and the Doctor was clutching at the bars of his cage so tightly, his knuckles white, his tendons standing out and his ragged, filthy nails digging into his palms. He could see where Rose was holding just as tightly to the sheets beneath her, and wanted nothing more than to hold her hand for her, to be there for her, to help her.

And throughout those long hours, as everyone but the Doctor was ground down into dust and blood, he felt more useless than perhaps he ever had, locked away, doing nothing.

For the Doctor, that was the worst.

* * *

For Francine, the worst part of it was the child.

By now she had heard of the plan to get out, to be staged when Rose was up and about again, but she had little hope that it might work. She was rather resigned to her existence on this ship and she had worked hard to make it work. She had cultivated relationships with the right people below decks, organised chains of command that included her and Tish, learnt everything she could about the Master in order to avoid upsetting him and generally set about making this existence as bearable as possible for herself and her family.

But her main strategy for getting through was not thinking about the future. She could deal with one task at a time, she could work through each day as it came, but she could not stomach the idea of being here forever.

She looked at Tish, saw the permanent bags under her eyes and the collection of scars that were accumulating on her skin, and knew that she couldn't deal with all of those scars together. She could wash each individual cut and try to scavenge plasters where she could, but she couldn't think that her daughter was going to keep being damaged. She'd been so proud of Tish, her firstborn, the first part of her legacy. She'd been doing so well with that job with Lazarus, she'd been going places. Now she was going nowhere. Francine's firstborn would die a slave.

Rose's firstborn would live as her master.

For Francine, this baby represented the most unavoidable symbol that this despicable state of affairs would never end. This child was the start of another legacy, the Master's legacy, and its existence meant that Francine's children were denied any chance at a life.

It wasn't in Francine's nature to hate innocent children, but she thought she could make an exception for this half-breed bastard.

And then she caught herself thinking that, and hated herself.

And then her daughter staggered downstairs with a concussion and a twisted ankle.

And after that she felt fully justified in her hatred.

For Francine, that was the worst.

* * *

Rose knew that she wouldn't remember this. She knew it because she'd been hurt plenty in the past, and somehow she never remembered how much it hurt until the next time she was grazed by a ray gun or whatever. She also knew it because it was one of those pieces of ancient wisdom from round the Estate – of course a mother never remembered exactly how much it hurt to give birth, because why else would all those idiot girls end up with four kids before they were twenty two?

"But you know the bit I'll always remember," Jackie would say to Rose during all those you're-better-than-those-sluts and don't-make-the-mistakes-that-I-did talk, "it was the moment when they put you in my arms, after they'd wiped you off a bit. And I was still hurting like hell, and your dad was white as a sheet, and god, you weren't half shrieking, but it sort of made sense. Not like it was an ending, but like we'd all realised that this was the starting line, and we were ready to start running. And bloody hell, you gave us a workout. You were a nightmare baby, you were…"

And she would trail off into tales of lost sleep and complaining neighbours and mental breakdowns, but Rose always remembered her mum's idea of the moment when she met her daughter for the first time. The moment when everyone was ready to start running, start fighting for this baby.

When finally the baby was out and the cord was cut, Rose felt like she was waiting for that moment, as if she couldn't quite relax until it had occurred. This was what childbirth was, to her. This was the point of it all.

"It's a boy," one of the midwives whispered, automatically moving back towards Rose, who shifted slightly back to better support herself against the pillows, stretching out her arms for her son – her son! – until –

"Give him to me."

The midwife hesitated, and then turned around, still looking down at the baby and not meeting Rose's eye. Then she walked forward and presented the child to the Master. He took him, and looked down on the wailing little thing with a smirk.

"Can I hold him?" Rose asked. "Please?"

The Master didn't even look up. "No."

He turned and left the room.

The two midwives looked at each other, and then the older one hurried after him to take care of the baby. The younger one turned back to Rose.

"I'm sorry," she said.

Rose nodded. She folded her arms against her chest, pressing them to her.

"Rose?" asked the Doctor.

Her breath hitched, and the tears which had fallen so freely over the past day began again.

"Rose," he said gently.

But she didn't respond, and he didn't press any further.

When she delivered the afterbirth, it was painful, bloody and shameful. And she thought to herself: I am a brood mare. My life is painful, bloody and shameful.

And I don't have my son.

For Rose, that was the worst.

* * *

_A/N: I have an issue with this chapter. No, not the fact that it was published six months after the previous one - after all, I know how this story's going to end. I'm not on tenterhooks. No, my issue with this chapter is that it is title-less. If you haven't realised by now, all the chapter titles are modern Doctor Who quotes (apart from Exit Wounds, which is named after a Torchwood episode because it's pretty much all Torchwood based). So if you have any suggestions for titles, I would appreciate them, because my favourite transcript site is NOT WORKING!_

_As for the whole six-month-gap-thing... well, you have a choice. You can blame university, Downton Abbey and RL for distracting me. You can blame a lack of inspiration (though that's not true - this whole chapter has been written in my head since at least August. It's just not been written on my computer until tonight). Or you can just blame me. If I were you, I'd go for the latter._

_EDIT: chapter title has now been found! It is "The child is lost," as suggested by jadesei, who is evidently a much better Whovian than me. Thanks, jadesei!  
_


End file.
